Journal of Applied Arts & Health - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2025

This article explores the role of researcher response art in supporting reflexive practice in mixed methods inquiry. The integration of art-based modes of inquiry and mixed methods research remains underexplored, yet this methodological partnership is well placed to offer collaborative and multidisciplinary insights. In the context of a mixed methods project conducted within a public women’s health setting, we describe an approach that is fundamentally informed by an art therapy perspective; however, is sensitive to the diverse scope and complexity of interdisciplinary healthcare inquiry. Research vignettes detail salient moments in the project, identifying three distinct functions of researcher-made images in mixed methods research. First, researcher response art served to foreground ethical and humanistic dimensions of mixed methods research. Second, response art fostered epistemological clarity and centralized participant lived experience in applied research. Third, researcher images contributed to an enhanced reflexive narrative in the synthesis of the findings.

In this article the authors outline a design and delivery of a participatory performance project, which took place in a Kilmarnock care home for people living with dementia (PLWD). In designing the project, the researchers aimed to improve the quality of lives of PLWD through a focus on the active agency of the participants and the co-creation of performance material. Over a period of five weeks in autumn 2023, the care home residents engaged in weekly performance workshops, which offered them opportunities to become ‘performers’. As we demonstrate, their participation in this innovative project enhanced their agency, confidence and overall well-being. In concluding, the authors present a positive case for participant agency being central to project design and make some recommendations for best practices when working with PLWD in care home settings, therefore enhancing their overall quality of life.

Little is known about the effects of visual art in hospitals on the health and well-being of patients and their families. This study investigates how patients and their families experience visual art in a hospital and what it means to them. The authors employ a phenomenological-interpretive design, incorporating participant observations, micro-interviews, in-depth interviews and a co-creative session with patients and their families. The experience of art in the hospital takes place within a triangular field of visual art (which is experienced passively, actively and neutrally) by the person (in the role of patient or family) and the hospital (building environment and its care function). The presence of visual art in hospitals can touch patients and their families emotionally, fostering a sense of home and humanity, stimulating imagination and fantasy and providing a welcome distraction. Visual art contributes to a more pleasant and relaxed environment.

This article offers an art-based exploration of the author’s therapeutic work in contexts of pregnancy loss, focusing on the experience of those who make the profoundly difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy for medical reasons (TFMR). The existing literature points to high levels of psychological distress in this group, against a backdrop of polarized debates on abortion care. There are gaps in cultural representations of the TFMR experience across the arts, as well as a dearth of exploration in the psychotherapeutic domain. The author sets out to represent these complex experiences and to delineate key therapeutic tasks using art-based self-inquiry. The methodology incorporates image-making and reflections on clinical practice, taking as a starting point the word ‘vessel’, which evokes associations to pregnancy and the therapeutic process. The incorporation of hand-stitching within the image-making process echoes the endeavour of textile artists in other contexts to capture marginalized experiences.

Review of: Trauma and Embodied Healing in Dramatherapy, Theatre and Performance, Jean-Francois Jacques (ed.) (2024)

New York: Routledge, 282 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-03234-482-9, p/bk, $34.99