Journal of Applied Arts & Health - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012

An introduction to the special issue on Opportunities and Challenges in Art-Based Research, which defines art-based research as the use of artistic expression by researchers as a primary mode of enquiry, and discusses the need for applied arts and health disciplines to understand, support and perfect methods of artistic enquiry, thus applying their unique resources to realizing the opportunities proffered by the arts as ways of understanding and communicating human experience.

This article traces the development of a way of working using art and writing as a systematic methodology for research that can be considered a specific lineage in expressive art therapy following from the contributions of Carl Jung, especially his The Red Book. It calls for art not only to come into regular use as a form of enquiry but also argues that research outcomes can be presented in aesthetic forms in which narratives are enacted performatively. By remaining tied to academic forms in either our methods or our presentation of outcomes, researchers disable the emergence of new knowing and diminish the possibility of change and transformation.

Art-based enquiry is at the heart of what we do as arts-based therapists. Art-based research, a natural outgrowth of art-based enquiry, utilizes creative intelligence through immersion in creative process and scholarly reflection. This article examines the challenges in using art as evidence in research studies for students and clinicians and why other research methods are utilized first in the hopes of gaining validation from those outside the profession.

This article traces an art therapy practitioner/educator’s history with art therapy research and recounts significant influences that helped the author develop a clear sense of the importance of art-based modes of enquiry. Particular attention is given to the scepticism in the professional art therapy community regarding arts-based methodologies and the pivotal role of mentorship in overcoming such reservations. A plea is made for integrating arts practices into the ways researchers initiate questions, gather and analyse data, and articulate findings. The author calls on art therapy researchers to bring their artistic sensibilities to every question and problem, and to use those sensibilities in every presentation and scholarly production.

An art-based pedagogical research approach was used by a group of students and faculty who embarked upon a twelve-month process of artistic enquiry to explore the phenomenon of intersubjectivity as it emerged within a simulated creative arts therapies (CATs) context. The challenges we identified and faced soon became opportunities and phenomena central to representing our experience, as well as representing an emergent model for art-based research and CATs. Transition, transference, transcendence, transformation and translation are the phenomena we identified that described the dynamic and dialectic experiences of intersubjective artistic enquiry. We conclude that this emerging art-based pedagogical research model is essential not only to systematic enquiry in the CATs, but also in all forms of human self-/other exploration and meaning-making.

In this article, the authors discuss the use of art-based research, specifically performance ethnographic and autoethnographic processes, within clinical supervision of drama therapists. Performance ethnography will be discussed as it is utilized for case conceptualization, treatment planning and supervision of clinical treatment. Core, overlapping concepts from performance ethnography and drama therapeutic theory, such as verbatim dialogue and metaphor, validation and mutuality, embodiment and faithful rendering, will be discussed and demonstrated through case examples. The article concludes with a vision of the art-based researcher/supervisor as not only a participant-observer, but also a performer, one who is perpetually challenged by playing multiple roles.

This article explores the author’s experiences of serving on dissertation committees in which a primary methodology is art-based. Experiences at two different universities, one a state university in the United States and one an international graduate school in Europe, reveal both challenges and opportunities discovered in working with these new methodologies. The author reflects on her experiences with the student researchers, with faculty colleagues, with the institutional cultures of the universities, and with the author’s own struggles to learn new ways of thinking about the world of researchers conducting narrative, ritual, movement, musical, performative, poetic and visual forms of enquiry.

This article presents an intersubjective exchange between three researchers who explore their understanding of the risks and rewards involved in utilizing art-based methods. Set within the structure of a triptych form, each author spontaneously created an image as a response to the theme, as well as to each other’s images. In this article, the images are understood to lead the words, with conceptualizations emerging, in part, from the visual forms. Various methodological dilemmas are discussed and illustrated drawing on examples from recent art-based studies undertaken by each researcher.

Researchers who draw upon artistic practice as a medium of knowledge creation and representation require and often rely upon skills that are central to improvisation, such as an openness to uncertainty, an attunement to difference and the aesthetic intelligence necessary to track significance. This paper examines art-based research through the lens of improvisation in order to highlight critical challenges and opportunities in this emerging approach to enquiry.

Across all cultures, some form of the dictum to know thyself has echoed throughout the ages as our primary calling in life. Many great thinkers believed that turning attention inward and conscientiously exploring the diversity of our inner landscape would awaken human consciousness. In many ways, they were validating a core sentiment of art-based research (ABR) discussed in this article. That is, through the self-referential, autonomous and egalitarian quality of images accessible through the arts, we can know and research layers of personal identity. This can happen through various approaches to ABR including scientific and contemplative methods. Additionally, misunderstandings from the academy and from within the expressive therapies, which can define a nascent field like ABR, also need to be addressed. Therefore, this article is divided in two parts, one focusing on a personal example of ABR and the other looking at challenges to the efficacy of ABR.

This article investigates opportunities and challenges for art-based research through an observed art-making experience. The ‘participant observation’ methodology is adopted, reflecting everyday arts and psychotherapy practice. Simple mark-making experiences were orchestrated, experienced and observed, and attempts made to categorize them. The difficulty of instantly moving between cognitive modes, and the complexity and inseparability of the sensual and associative experiences induced, made it clear that isolating variables cannot describe the behaviour of complex systems, including art and consciousness, but does interfere with them. A reductive, isolationist method catalysed compensatory perceptions of relatedness, connection and complexity. Systemic concepts such as the ‘emergent properties’ of self-organizing systems offer more congruent tools to investigate art and psychological experience.