alumni directory

Nicole Haywood

Drawing

Artist & Clinical Art Therapist · BFA · Class of 2017

reshapelings.wixsite.com/thewoods

After graduating with her BFA in Drawing from AUArts, Haywood received her postgraduate diploma in Clinical Art Psychotherapy and Expressive Therapies Continuum Practitioner training from the Canadian International Institute of Art Therapy. Haywood is now completing her Master's in Counselling Psychology at City University.

Haywood maintains her art practice and works as a clinical art therapist privately and within the Alberta healthcare system, supporting children, adolescents, and young adults. Nicole personally experienced the transformative power of self-expression as a young person and now feels honoured to walk with others on their own creative healing journey.

In her personal art practice, Haywood creates both figurative and abstracted artworks to process her emotions and give voice to the darker corners of her inner world. Through her work, she seeks to inspire open conversations around the complexities of the human experience and further illuminate the impressions that trauma can leave on an individual's perceptions of life, meaning, and identity.

Haywood draws from her own lived experiences with mental illness, personal and intergenerational trauma, and distorted/altered states of consciousness: dreams, reveries, memories, flashbacks, night terrors, and nightmares. Haywood has a deep love for psychology, science fiction, horror, and the natural world, which deeply inform her work.

Haywood hopes that by sharing her art, she will better give voice to and learn to love the shadowy parts of her own psyche. She hopes to inspire others to do the same.