Body Mapping

Body mapping is an arts-based, participatory method in which people draw life-size or templated outlines of their own bodies and fill them with images, symbols, colors, and words that externalize embodied experience — illness, pain, identity, trauma, or healing. The body becomes a canvas on which interior states that are hard to put into words are made visible and shareable. The resulting body map is analyzed not as a picture alone but as a visual narrative, read together with the story the participant tells about it.