About Alisoun Neville
Crayons and Stuff Director
Creative Arts Therapist — Somatic Experiencing Practitioner
Registered Clinical Counsellor
Multidisciplinary Artist — Painting, Photography, Textiles, Words & More
I am the founder and director of Crayons and Stuff, a practice where arts practice, creative arts therapy, and somatic approaches are brought together in a relational and ethically grounded way.
I am sharing myself here as a practicing artist, which took me a long time to say, or even to accept as important in my role. My journey through art-making may parallel parts of yours — there were forms, such as music and writing, I had once loved and yearned for again, and there were forms I had to learn from the beginning, and genuinely believed I couldn’t do. I had been terrible at handwriting all through school and believed this meant I would never be able to draw.
Too many of us think that art=drawing, even when we know that isn’t true. I still have pretty poor fine motor skills although with practice they are much better than they were. The left-handedness of my style remains but I can embrace it now and enjoy what comes with a looser hold on control.
In my therapy practice, creative arts therapy is integrated with somatic psychotherapy, grounded in relational practice, to support embodied and creative living, awareness, and change. Developing my awareness of the body as both therapist and artist has led me into new ways of knowing, in always evolving contact with myself, with people around me, and within the living world.
My orientation to this work is also shaped by lived experience. I come to practice with an awareness of how trauma, chronic stress, and systemic harm can be held in the body and carried over time, including within my own life. This does not sit apart from my professional training or systems work, but alongside it, informing how I think about safety, agency, and ethics in therapeutic practice.
I know your journey will be different and am glad of that. I look forward to learning more together.
Other Stuff that Matters
I am trained in Arts Therapy (Masters level) and Somatic Experiencing®. My work has been shaped through long-term engagement with creative practice, relational ethics, and embodied approaches, as well as teaching, consultation, and leadership roles in therapeutic and community settings.
I am a registered counsellor with the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA) and a founding member of PACFA's College of Creative and Experiential Therapies (CCET). My work is informed by professional development, clinical supervision, and ethical accountability within these frameworks.
I live and practise on Boon Wurrung / Bunurong country in the Bass Coast region, with ongoing connections to Wurundjeri land in Melbourne’s north. Place, material engagement, and creative process are not peripheral to my work; they are central to how I understand practice, meaning-making, and ethical relationship.
Somatic work has deepened my relationship with my living body and, through this, grounded access to the wider ecologies within which I co-exist. This understanding informs how I approach therapeutic work — as something that unfolds within relational and ecological contexts, rather than solely within the individual.
My approach is collaborative and emergent. Sessions may involve creative processes, movement, sensation, or conversation, depending on what is supportive in the moment. You do not need prior experience with art-making or somatic work — only a willingness to explore your experience as it unfolds. I work with care for complexity, respecting both personal agency and the wider contexts in which our lives take shape.
If you would like to explore working together in this way, you can visit Creative Arts and Somatic Therapies for more on my approach, or get in touch directly here.
More Stuff (if you want to keep reading)
Before establishing a private practice, my work was centred in public policy, advocacy, and the design of programs and systems within community, health, and justice contexts. Working at this level exposed the structural conditions that shape people’s lives — including how access, safety, and choice are constrained by institutional and social forces rather than individual capacity. This experience continues to inform my therapeutic work, grounding it in an awareness of power, responsibility, and the limits of prescriptive models.
Prior to and alongside this work, I have written and published about how knowledge, practice, and ways of being are shaped by cultural and systemic conditions. This includes doctoral research on colonial inheritances and their ongoing presence in law, science, and bureaucracy in Australia.
My orientation to embodiment and ecology has also been shaped through long-term work in cross-cultural legal and policy contexts, where questions of land, sovereignty, responsibility, and relationality cannot be treated as abstract. This work, grounded in relationship, unsettled individualised models of wellbeing and reinforced the inseparability of bodies, histories, and place. I hold this with care — aware that as someone of Irish descent I am not claiming cultural belonging in either place, but am shaped by and accountable to the relationships and places within which I live and practise. I also watch with much interest and admiration as, in Ireland today, growing movements of language, culture, and return to land seem to be shaping public discussions and cultural change.
In collaborating with Melissa in the development of Living Space Studio Gallery, I am reminded of what we share as community, including here on Millowl/Phillip Island, and to more actively trust creativity, connection, and collective care.