About Alisoun Neville

Crayons and Stuff Director

Creative Arts Therapist - Somatic Experiencing Practitioner

Registered Clinical Counsellor

I am the founder and director of Crayons and Stuff, a practice where creative arts therapy and somatic approaches are brought together in a relational and ethically grounded way. I work with adults and children, offering individual sessions and workshops online across Victoria and in Phillip Island (Milowl) and surrounding areas.

At Crayons and Stuff, creative arts therapy is integrated with somatic psychotherapy, grounded in relational practice, to support embodied and creative living, awareness, and change.

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.

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 on creative practice, ethics, colonial histories, and social contexts, contributing to conversations about how knowledge, practice, and ways of being are shaped by cultural and systemic conditions. This includes doctoral research working across literature and law, which explored key investments of the colonial project and how these inheritances continue to shape colonial violence through science, bureaucracy, and law 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.

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.

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, you can visit the Work with Me page or get in touch via Contact.