A Note
Always trust play and mess, the aimless, quiet wandering that transforms what careful planning cannot. In touching materials, dancing with them, letting go, we allow ourselves to be swallowed by the depths and moved by slow currents beneath. Through our touch and sight, what lives in the depths becomes real. And so do we. Emerging at the tips of trembling fingers.
The gift of no plan is rarer than it sounds. The heart of the studio holds this gift as you would hold something living.
Roots of the Practice
The Stick Fort draws on two traditions that trust the same thing: that what a person needs to discover is already moving in them, and that it shows itself through the body and through making, often before it finds words.
The open studio
The open studio tradition, shaped by Pat Allen and the Open Studio Project, treats the studio itself as the therapeutic space. Materials are laid out and freely available. There is no assigned project and no interpretation imposed from outside. The therapist makes art alongside the child rather than watching from across the table, and the work is treated as art, not as a symptom to be decoded.
In this tradition, art is a way of knowing. When a child follows a material where it wants to go, they follow something in themselves too. My role is to hold the space, to make alongside them, and to witness what emerges without rushing to name it.
Developmental Transformations
Developmental Transformations, or DvT, is an embodied approach to therapy developed by David Read Johnson, with whom I trained for four years. It works through improvisation and play. Therapist and child enter a shared playspace together, where scenes, characters, sounds, and movements arise and transform freely, one into the next.
DvT trusts instability. Rather than steering toward a fixed outcome, it follows what shifts, what repeats, and what surprises, because that's where something real tends to surface. In the playspace, a child can approach what's frightening, tender, or unspeakable at their own pace, in a form they can hold, with someone fully present beside them.
What they share
Both traditions ask the therapist to enter the work rather than stand outside it. Both trust process over product, and presence over technique. And both understand that children often heal not by explaining what hurts, but by playing, making, and moving their way through it, with someone paying close attention.
How we touch materials mimics how we touch the world. Here, both are given room.