The Medium Is the Message: How Material Choices Reflect Mental States
We think we are choosing our materials. Sometimes it feels more like they choose us.
My hands don’t just like yarn. My hands need yarn. There’s something about the texture, the resistance, the weight. It grounds me in ways that typing or reading never could. I often live in my head; yarn helps me come back into my body.
Years ago, during one of my deepest depressive episodes, I couldn’t write. I could barely think. But I could crochet. And not just anything. I could crochet with thick, chunky wool that almost held me up when I felt like falling through the cracks.
It took me a long time to understand that my creative medium wasn’t just a preference. It was a psychological barometer.
Material is Memory
Different materials evoke different emotional states. A vintage fabric might trigger nostalgia. Clay might bring a sense of raw possibility or recall therapy sessions. Artists often unconsciously gravitate toward materials that mirror or counterbalance their current internal state.
When I’m dissociated or numb, I pick something that pulls me back into my body.
When I’m overstimulated, I want repetition and softness.
In both cases I might turn to crochet, but the choice of which yarn to use, which stitches to feel with my fingers, varies based on what I need.
This isn’t accidental. It’s part of a deep feedback loop between sensation, memory, and identity. I’ve often watched clients in 1:1 sessions come to sudden realizations about the materials they’ve surrounded themselves with. I’ve often come to those realizations again myself.
One woman I know returned to watercolor after years of painting with acrylics because, in her words, “I needed to be okay with things running outside the lines.”
Another started working with scrap textiles as she processed a fragmented sense of self after trauma. By talking about what she was working with, what drew her to it, we came together to understand how it was deeply serving her.
We think we are choosing our materials. Sometimes it feels more like they choose us.
The Materiality of Regulation
Material choices often emerge from a need to regulate. When I am anxious, I reach for familiar textures. Yarn. Paper. Cotton. Something pliable and rhythmic. Something my body already knows.
I crochet not to make things, but to make it through.
I have watched others seek out beading, or metal stamping, or clay pressing with the same intention. Not to produce something beautiful. But to keep from unraveling.
When I am depressed, I also turn to collage because it lets me rip and rearrange what feels broken. It lets me create out of materials that already exist and just need to be arranged, rather than trying to exert the energy to come up with something entirely new. Working off of someone else’s crochet pattern can do this as well.
Pat Ogden’s work in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy reminds me that the body stores what language cannot. She talks about how we must complete unfinished movements in the body to process trauma. I think about how that maps onto the creative act. We finish something. A line of stitches. A tiny embroidery. A painted gesture repeated until the hand quiets. This completion calms the nervous system, even when the mind is too tired to understand why.
I once worked with a creative who only used charcoal for years, even though it smudged and frustrated her. Eventually she realized why she kept choosing it: she needed to see the mess. To let things blur.
She said, “I needed to believe I could survive impermanence.”
She worked with charcoal until she no longer felt she needed it. Lately she’s been quilting, sewing tiny scraps together into a thing that holds. I’m curious to see how that develops for her, what it means.
Mediums carry emotional function. Not just form. The sensory profile of each one has a job. The repetition of crochet creates rhythm. Watercolor asks for surrender. Beads require precision. We are drawn to the texture that speaks most clearly to our needs. And when our needs shift, so do our materials.
Cycles of Change
I have had whole seasons where I couldn’t write. But I could photograph. Or cook. Or crochet. I’ve learned not to see these shifts as creative blocks. They are creative translations. My inner voice speaking in a different dialect.
Psychologist Shaun McNiff describes this as a kind of creative ecosystem. Each person contains a constellation of media that light up or go dim depending on what’s needed. He urges us to follow those impulses, rather than cling to one form. That idea freed me. It made me see that I wasn’t abandoning my writing self when I stopped journaling. I was listening. Making room for the part of me that needed color or quiet or slowness instead.
There’s also a kind of grief in this. I remember a time when I absolutely believed that I might never be able to write again. It felt like literally losing a language. But the moment I picked up a camera, I understood something new. The language hadn’t disappeared. It had changed shape. It was in the way I framed a photo. The softness of the light. The pacing of the series. Medium, in that moment, was not a surface choice. It was how I stayed alive to myself.
Feminist theorist Jill Dolan talks about “utopian performatives” which are moments in art when we glimpse the world as it could be, not just as it is. I think material choice can function like that. When you’re ill, working with soft wool might be the only form of comfort you can control. When you’re angry, painting with your hands can be the only way to express what words distort. These aren’t aesthetic decisions. They are survival strategies. They are also visions. Tiny utopias formed through texture.
A Practice for Noticing
Here’s a simple reflection practice I turn to often:
Take inventory of your current medium. What are its sensory, emotional, and logistical properties?
Track the emotional needs it meets. Does it soothe, challenge, numb, revive?
Notice what you’re avoiding. Are there materials that feel too raw or too silent?
Invite experimentation. Not to force change, but to gently expand your expressive range.
The Message Within the Material
The medium is not neutral. It is chosen, sometimes with conscious intention, often with unconscious wisdom. When we pay attention to the materials we reach for, we begin to understand something about the unspoken needs beneath our art. And that, in itself, is healing.
If you read this far, perhaps you like the writing. It takes work. Support it if you’re able:
Feeling this today, Kathryn! 💕 After a rush editing job (without the good feels), my writing hand feels empty, wounded even. But my garden wants to thrive. An affirmation of life might be in order. I’ll try and get my hands on the soil today, even if only 15 min.
Thank you for this thoughtful exploration of how our body and soul speak to us through the medium we use!
I appreciate the compassionate reminder in your words for us to honor our own soul and body needs rather than “be consistent” to honor some identity we’ve created for ourselves.
After decades as a writer, I am seeing how much that was a taught survival skill (rather than a joyful process), when in reality I am a very visual thinker. I am finally owning that writing keeps me in my head, stifling my creativity. Allowing myself to leave behind that identity (and practice) has opened a richer embodied connection to and expression of my inner self… watercolor, clay, music, and recording my thoughts when in the woods has been such a lighter way to create!
After your piece, I am also curious what it says that I am drawn to the fiber arts but am having a hard time getting the technique down enough to lose myself in it rather than white-knuckle it trying to get the stitches correct. 😅. I keep picking up and relearning knitting, had a crochet fail last fall during hurricane season, and am incredibly drawn to embroidery and hand sewing so am slowly teaching myself. I am ready to manifest some big things in my life, and there feels something so tangible about being able to knit/sew my own clothes or embroider beauty and intention into what I wear.