Journal of Applied Arts & Health - Celebrating Shaun McNiff, Oct 2023

The authors have been journeying with Shaun McNiff from the inception of his training programmes at Lesley University in the mid-1970s. In those early years, students and faculty experimented together in the development and integration of new forms in therapy, education and the arts. The pioneering exuberance and creative thought McNiff personified was already evident as was his commitment to enduring principles that have sustained his influence and approach. With convincing clarity, McNiff gathered around him a circle of colleagues all committed to the engagement of the creative process across and between all disciplines of the expressive arts, and together led us towards ‘trusting that process’ in its unfolding into form. The themes of entering the ‘slipstream’, ‘trusting the process’ and letting ‘conflict define’ will be discussed further in this article in the genesis and influence of McNiff’s work in the United States and internationally.

In resonance with lived art-based research, this article aims to let the art speak through image and poetry and to reflect the phenomenon of imagination and reality within expressive arts in an interdisciplinary mode. The article focuses specifically on Shaun McNiff’s cover image Pianofish of his book Integrating the Arts in Therapy: History, Theory, and Practice through poetic response, dialogue and expressive arts theory of practice. The notion of different realities and imagination as we know it from the literary genre ‘magic realism’ have been central components since the inception of the field of expressive arts at Lesley University. This article reflects ‘magic realism’ in its play with different realities and Shaun McNiff’s appeal to stay with the image. The author refers to Salman Rushdie’s notion of ‘magic realism’ in the context of the phenomenologically based expressive arts.

Across his career Shaun McNiff wrote of the role of witnessing art makers’ processes in the context of art therapy. In 2004 he reminded his readers that offering useful interpretations conveys imagination and insight, opening the possibility of new ways to see artwork and warm it with human contact. In this article the authors consider how McNiff’s ideas about witnessing have informed their understanding of creative practice. Throughout this process an enhanced familiarity of the emergent life within the artwork is found to simultaneously foster a subjective sense of well-being and trust in McNiff’s (1998) call to consider the deeper ecology of creation. McNiff (2004) famously calls on art makers to dialogue with their images. In this article the authors inquire into the experience of witnessing and communicating with words and images in the development of paintings, from the alternating contexts of studio and the screen.

This article describes Shaun McNiff’s perspective on people as artists, in the form of a practical application, an artistic achievement and a contextualization of McNiff with contemporary quantum philosophy by Karen Barad. McNiff recognizes people as active participants in the healing and learning process. The inner images experienced are expressed through art-based methods. The so-called intra-actions by Barad can be transferred to the dialogue between creator and the object, McNiff transforms them in the work of art. Here, art contributes to an essential sense of well-being, conveys connectedness by representing an entanglement of the creating person, feeling and material. Conversation can also be understood as inner contemplation, and in any case, always at the centre is trust in the process that unexpectedly allows things to speak and relate. McNiff anticipates contemporary quantum-physical ideas of philosophy, which describes for example the Agentic Realism, as ‘existence is not an individual affair’.

This article looks at themes that have emerged from the work of the author over the last three decades and their resonance with ideas advanced by Shaun McNiff. The author reflects on how the thinking, writing and inspiration of McNiff have pertained to her work as an artist and art therapist with displacement, social upheaval, trauma, disaster and conflict, inside and outside of clinical settings. The three themes addressed in this article include: transformation and art therapy, science and the arts in research, and chi. Although very different, all point to the primacy of the art and imagination that have been at the heart of McNiff’s writings for over five decades. The commitment to the arts, creativity and imagination in healing continues to challenge many lay people and professionals alike especially when science is the predominant narrative of our times.

This article provides an overview of the author’s creative experience of developing an art-based approach in practice and research as a registered art therapist in the United Kingdom and the influence that Shaun McNiff has had in shaping the author’s work. The first section describes a visual narrative documenting the author’s experience of a creative arts studio group facilitated by McNiff during his London visit in 2018. The second section extends these art-based experiences into a research design format developed by the author in relation to clinical response art. Both areas converge through the intersection of internal embodied affect and externalized expression through art.

The one-canvas method is heavily oriented to the interplay of images that transform over a sustained period. Art-based inquiry that explored how compositions were created and transformed was led by two core assumptions of Shaun McNiff’s vision: art-making communicates differently from linear and logical comprehension and language, and an aesthetic focus generates unique ways of understanding and creating knowledge. This article reflects on the distillation of artistic evidence, an ongoing refining and discovery process through which outcomes emerge, that required a continual return to the one-canvas art and art-making as centres of discovery. Illuminating McNiff’s commitment to art as evidence, the primacy of the artist-self fostered empirical exploration that felt honest, alive and generative. McNiff’s curiosities about multiple perspectives with attention to whole-body multi-sensory observation, engagement as researcher-participant and reflection using digital media were integral to a research design that culminated in artistic essence as discovery.

Shaun McNiff and his work is the subject of this article with particular review of his integrative and collaborative ideology. Leading a global commitment to art-based research, the article traces McNiff’s approach and contribution to the field of applied arts and health with beginnings in expressive therapies from the 1970s. His work in developing a practice-based research methodology called ‘art-based research’ is internationally renowned. Art-based research is distinguished by the inclusion of the artistic objects in addition to the practitioners themselves. He explicitly values the interplay between the creator and the created in providing greatest potential to the practitioner researcher. McNiff’s writing and practice reinforces his personal commitment to creating with others to supplement the value of working alone. His personal philosophy of the ‘creative slipstream effect’ manifests as multiple forces of the group augmenting creative energy and participants can merge together into common flow that carries everyone in it.