Colleen Merrill on what inspired her research presentation “Mirroring: Affirming the Self as Parent, Artist, and Academic”:

Looking at the child stages of development in regards to Donald Winnicott who was another psychoanalyst who wrote the book "Playing in Reality" from 1971… And that book hashes out a few of these different stages of development— mirroring the transitional object, social awareness— and how these things relate to a child's sort of creative impulse. And I'm like how...what a great sort of metaphor to think about that too for the artist—for the parent—that they're also going through a very similar type of developmental stage in their own right. You know they're also going through these sort of formative years that a child is going through at the same time. When we have children, we're emerging in our careers, we're emerging as artists. Why don't we sort of recognize that and discuss that more? So that's sort of what inspired it.