Applied Arts and Health

Building Bridges across Arts, Therapy, Health, Education, and Community

Edited by Ross W. Prior, Mitchell Kossak, Teresa A. Fisher

Publication date:

15 November 2022

Publisher

Intellect Books

Dimensions:

244x170mm
7x10"

ISBN-13: 9781789386257

This collection documents diverse approaches in creative arts engagement, building metaphoric bridges across the field with an emphasis on creativity and well-being in education and community development.

Focussing on applied arts and health practice, research, scholarship, expressive arts therapy, community and education, the book advances integrative and multimodal art-based processes. This book aims to give prominence to art-based research and provides useful support to those working and researching across applied arts and health, education and community contexts. The book brings together a collection of world-leading authors in the field spanning a range of cultures, documenting projects and significantly adding to cohesive research in the field.

In continuing to advance applied arts and health, whilst furthering a commitment to art-based research, this new book places emphasis upon the artistic research methodology, underlining that art (performing art and visual art) is the evidence. It offers the field an integral vision for the arts both theoretically and practically. Further, the book breaks down the silos of practice that have been unhelpful in their development.

The audience for this book will include art-based researchers, expressive arts practitioners and scholars, arts educators, and those interested in bridging the gap between arts and health practice. Masters and doctoral level students in art-based research, participatory research, and qualitative research with an arts-focus are another audience for the book. All applied arts and health practitioners and academics, arts educators, art therapists and university PaR programmes. Whilst of particular use to postgraduate students, this text will also be useful to final year undergraduate students in assisting them with creative practice-based dissertations and projects. Also useful to researchers, practitioners and a range of research degree programmes in applied arts and health, education and community engagement.

Acknowledgements
Preface
Foreword – Shaun McNiff
Introduction: Art as a Bridge – Ross W. Prior, Mitchell Kossak, and Teresa A. Fisher

PART 1: ARTISTIC EVIDENCE
1. Art Is the Evidence: Convincing Public Communication of Art-Based Research and Its Outcomes – Shaun McNiff
2. Bridging Past, Present, and Future: What If There Were No Art? – Mitchell Kossak
3. Beyond the Walls: The Artist–Researcher and Performative Dissemination – Rebecca Stancliffe, Kate Wakeling, Lucy Evans, and Stella Howard
4. Making Music Together: Music Therapy with Women Experiencing Breast Cancer – Yanyi Yang

PART 2: UNDERSTANDING THROUGH ARTISTIC PRACTICE
5. Soulfulness: The Becoming of Being – Malcolm Ross
6. Bridging Arts and Healthcare Communities – J. Todd Frazier and Shay Thornton Kulha
7. Becoming our Story: Emergent Design through Affect – Carole Miller and Juliana Saxton
8. Building a Bridge between the Improvisational Expressive Arts and Music Education – Tawnya D. Smith

PART 3: WORKING TOGETHER
9. Slowly Winding the Thread: Art Therapy and Crisis: Supporting Communities through Art – Debra Kalmanowitz
10. A Bridge to Meaning: Creating Performance with Neurodiverse Young People – Rea Dennis
11. Beyond the Verbal: Dementia and PARticipatory Arts Research – Meghánn Catherine Ward, Christine Milligan, Emma Rose, and Mary Elliott
12. Transformative Impact of Drama in Mental Healthcare Education – Bruce Burton, Ingrid Femdal, Eva Bjørg Antonsen, and Margret Lepp

PART 4: WIDENING THE FIELD
13. The Healing Power of Art: Old Nordic Folk Knowledge Re-claimed – Wenche Torrissen, Anita Jensen, and Anita Salamonsen
14. Bridging Modalities and Playing with Identities: Art-based Workshop Reflections – Hillary Rubesin, Laura Teoli, Yu-Ying Chen, Dina Fried, and Michal Lev
15. Caring Attunement: The Performance of Ageing – Lisa Schouw
16. Reading as Community: Solace, Pleasures, and Becoming during COVID-19 Pandemic – Joanne O’Mara and Glenn Auld

Notes on Contributors
Index

Many incisive metaphors frame this impressive book concerning the interstices between art and health in community settings: bridges, walls, diseases and pandemics, souls and identities, threads and stories. The authors and editors skillfully weave these and similar images into a fabric of rich hues and tones to demonstrate how art, a timeless frame of being, holds together illness and wellness, thinking and creating, isolation and communitas, mind and body and spirit. Read this book, dear artists, arts educators, therapists and community workers, with an open heart, and you will find your way through the antipodes.