Journal of Applied Arts & Health - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2014

Arts and health practitioners, policy-makers and researchers were invited to a two-day search conference to talk about the nature of arts-based evidence, and ways of researching the impact of arts on health. Using a participatory enquiry process, participants shared stories of specific projects, discussed the aims, forms and politics of arts-based evidence, developed creative responses and practical strategies, and noted areas for further conversation and action. Two dominant themes emerged. First, the arts are particularly powerful in health generation; second, the most important evidence is that which shows how the arts can be a catalyst for change.

This article reports on an enquiry designed to explore the impact of the arts on health though a participatory arts installation during the Evidence in a Different Form Conference. Delegates were invited to contribute to the installation with small, personally meaningful objects related to the arts, health and evidence. The process and content of the installation are discussed, focusing on dynamic interactions, conversations and meaningful associations that evolved. Implications identified relate to the arts, place-making and restorative environments, how personal meanings attached to art can change over time and how the direction of projects using arts-based processes can sometimes develop unpredictably. This installation project demonstrates how being open to the natural evolution of a project can reap meaningful results for communities.

Well-planned and evaluated work that produces measurable repeatable outcomes will add to the evidence base for arts and health. Two participatory artworks were created over consecutive years to promote a welcoming ambience in reception areas on two sites of a community health service (CHS) in Victoria. The model used consultation and achieved maximum participation. A range of evaluation methods allowed for triangulation of the results. In addition to the improved ambience, qualitative thematic analysis identified outcomes for participants in both projects of connectedness, relaxation, reminiscence, enjoyment and beauty. By repeating a successful model and finding similar outcomes, we can develop the evidence base.

This article outlines an ongoing theatre collaboration between a group of professional artists and participants from the Prahran Mission St Kilda Drop In Centre in Melbourne, which is dedicated to supporting people who live with mental illness. The collaboration began five years ago and so far four projects have been created. The writer is one of the theatre artists. The case story here, presented to the conference Evidence in a Different Form, demonstrates that friendship is central to the artistic process. Friendship is an initial driving force and a result of the projects and is intrinsic to the creative process itself. This evidence suggests that the non-hierarchical and personal quality of the process is an instance of egalitarianism, dissolving divisions between individuals and groups. It suggests that these qualities of the work promote health and have the potential to undo social stigma and isolation.

This article discusses the evidence generated by a multimodal inquiry in a post-graduate counselling programme, where two students and a staff member co-researcher explored the arts processes they found most effective in a shared search for meaning. Here the roles of client and therapist were transformed into enquirer and companion and the focus was on the process of inquiry. Their self-reports, companion/witness reports and art representations (poems) provide evidence of their processes and dialogues over extended time. This evidence offers support for the value of arts-based inquiry set in relational processes marked by safety and trust for the meaning-making that can contribute to health.

This article addresses the challenge of excavating the evidence from our lived experience with arts and health, describing the impact of direct personal experience with art making on health, and of an inter-subjective aesthetic experience. This material, derived from a studio practice of painting that explored the experience of multiple sclerosis (MS), was presented as a case story at the Evidence in a Different Form Conference in 2013, and the kinds of evidence noted by the group are reported.

Exhibitions are frequently used to illustrate outcomes of arts therapy programmes, showcase community arts projects, and to gather research data. In this article we review some of the ethical dilemmas that arise in exhibiting client or participant artwork, and argue that attention to shared decision-making within an ethics of care framework is needed to ensure constructive ethical practice.

This article outlines the work undertaken to provide evidence required to support the development of the National Arts and Health Framework endorsed by the Australian health ministers in November 2013. The Institute For Creative Health was charged with being the sector’s reference organization and supplied the evidence required throughout the Framework’s development, as well as moderating the sector’s response to draft proposals. A two-phase process of assembling the evidence required to support government action was identified. With Finland, Australia leads the world in having the health jurisdictions create a National Arts and Health Framework, and appropriate evidence was critical at all stages of its development.

If health policy-makers are to fund arts/health programmes, they need evidence that there is a benefit. For some, the best research evidence is to be derived from blinded clinical trials that have been synthesized into a systematic review. Clearly, however, there are questions which cannot be answered with clinical trials. In this article we discuss how high-quality evidence can be derived from many kinds of research. Clinical trials are useful in some settings but we need to know about the full range of research methods in the emerging field of arts and public health. Researchers can use their own specialist knowledge and forge research collaborations to strengthen the use of arts-based methods for evidence for health improvement at a population level.

The article defines the nature of artistic evidence, and discusses factors that make it convincing, and how it relates to the emerging practice of art-based research. Distinctions are made between scientific and artistic evidence with the goal of furthering a complementary environment for enquiry that appreciates the historic ability of the arts to inform and inspire through their expression.

This article examines the differing processes involved in forming evidence to guide practice in arts-based and in health-care disciplines. A social theory framework suggests that aesthetic reflexivity can link the rational and affective aspects of practice in both areas. Intentional communities of practice that incorporate both arts and health practitioners can develop evidence that will take into account both health system goals of recovery from illness and social transformational goals of building healthy communities.

What place does therapy have in a world that is facing an ecological emergency? Once we come to see ourselves as cells of the whole system that we call the environment, it becomes impossible to ignore the well-being of the planet as we work to improve our clients’ well-being and our own. Bernie Neville, client-centred ecopsychologist, explains to Helen Varney, public health sociologist, how therapy can be imagined in a larger context, locating it within the ecological way of thinking. For the ecopsychologist and for the sociologist too the experience of the powerful, shared moment in therapy is one that is shared with the wider human community and with the universe itself. If we are looking for evidence of the benefit of arts and health for individuals and their communities, we should look more deeply into such experiences.

This article weaves together our responses, as three visitors and one Indigenous owner of this land, to the impending end of life, at least human life, on this planet. What we make of this almost impossible theme and what it makes of us are enacted through art, poetry, reverie, analysis and storytelling. We write in ways that are personal, lateral and yet collective, experimenting with how the tensions and connections between different art forms, methodologies and theories might contribute to an emergent ethic of ‘palliative care for the planet’.