Project
Becomings
engage · learn · reimagine · grow
Reimagining recovery narratives following adversity
Body Mapping
Exploring trauma and recovery through and beyond words
What Is Body Mapping?
Body mapping is a creative approach that uses the outline of the body as a space for exploring experiences, feelings and ideas. Images, words, colours, symbols and materials can be added to the body map, allowing experiences to be expressed and explored in different ways.
In Project Becomings
Body mapping was used within Project Becomings as a creative way of exploring experiences of trauma and recovery through and beyond words. Working with the outline of the body, co-researchers could use colour, images, words, symbols and other materials to explore experiences, sensations, relationships and meanings in ways that did not depend on conventional verbal accounts.
Rather than treating the body simply as something to represent, body mapping created opportunities to notice how experiences and knowledge might be felt, located, expressed and made visible differently.
About The Method
Body mapping is a creative method that uses the outline of the body as a space for exploration and expression. Within trauma and recovery research, it can create space to explore embodied and sensory knowledge — including how experiences may be felt through the body and entangled with relationships, memories and emotions.
Importantly, there is no single or ‘correct’ way to create or interpret a body map. Meaning is not imposed by the researcher but remains with the person creating it.
Why Use Body Mapping In Trauma And Recovery Research?
Trauma and recovery are not experienced only through thoughts or language. Experiences may also be embodied, sensory, relational and difficult to put into words. Research approaches that rely primarily on verbal accounts can therefore leave some forms of knowledge less visible.
Body mapping offers another way of knowing and communicating. The process of making — drawing, positioning, colouring, writing and working with materials — can enable participants to explore what becomes noticeable through creative and embodied engagement.
Within Project Becomings, this was particularly important because the research was interested not only in what people knew about recovery, but how recovery was experienced, felt and made possible through bodies, relationships, spaces and material encounters.
What Did Body Mapping Make Possible?
Body mapping made it possible for experiences of recovery to emerge as embodied, relational and changing, rather than as a straightforward journey from illness or trauma towards a fixed state of being ‘recovered’.
Through the process of making, co-researchers brought together experiences that might otherwise have appeared separate: emotions and bodily sensations, relationships and memories, places, objects, moments of difficulty, and sources of strength. These could sit alongside one another on the same body without needing to be resolved into a single or coherent story.
The maps also created space for contradiction and uncertainty. Recovery could involve pain and possibility, vulnerability and strength, connection and disconnection at the same time. What mattered was not only what appeared on the finished map, but what became noticeable through the process of creating it.
In this way, body mapping did more than represent experiences of recovery. The act of making became part of the inquiry itself — creating possibilities for different forms of knowledge to emerge and contributing to a more relational, embodied and non-linear understanding of recovery.
