Abstract
Creative arts therapy, like dragon-riding, is poly-sensory and paradoxical. This variegated practice frequently falls prey to reductive research processes. Yearning for less dissonance between the what and how of research and greater congruence between the skill sets practiced in research and therapy, the author began exploring arts-based research and autoethnography. These methodologies now entangle under the investigational umbrella-term abr+a (arts-based research through autoethnography). In this chapter, the abr+a-dragon's tail is grasped for an escapade that: explores abr+a as performed by several researchers; revisits workshops facilitated at Whitecliffe (Aotearoa, 2017-2021), the BAAT/AATA Conference (London, 2019), and the ANZACATA Symposium (Brisbane, 2019); and theory-builds by tracing presence, poiesis, process, partnerships, pixellation, playfulness and psyche within abr+a. The intention is to express abr+a's emergent poietic-praxis and contribute to international intersectional conversations about creative research practices appropriate to therapy within a post-truth era.
TopIntroduction And Background: The Ride Begins
A fellow-researcher and I are attempting to trace words around the numinous, embodied, perilous and poietic practice of abr+a – arts-based research through autoethnography. We’re both animated: we peer puzzled into the air above us while clutching with both hands at something…something shaped like a rope, a cord…a tail?!
The metaphor arrives, unfolding leathery wings with a triumphant crack.
Practicing abr+a is, for me, like clasping the tail-tip of a winged dragon in flight – its shape-shifting magical body frequently obscured by rushing cloud, the ever-changing ground below flickering in and out of view, our destination largely a mystery.
Figure 1. Deborah Green 2019 “Taking flight”. Digital collage.
My1 predominant experience of creative arts therapy (CAT) resembles dragon-riding – prismatic, parabolic, poly-sensory, and paradoxical. This variegated practice can fall prey, however, to rigid and reductive research processes. My yearning for less dissonance between what and how I was researching plus more congruent reciprocity between the skill-sets I was cultivating via both research and therapy, sent me questing. I stumbled across McNiff’s (1998) words: “the process of research should correspond as closely as possible to the experience of therapy” (p.170). Riding the back of this exhortation, I discovered arts-based research (ABR) and autoethnography (Holman Jones, Adams & Ellis, 2016; Leavy, 2018; McNiff, 1998, 2013). Simultaneously a practice, process and product, ABR is an ‘aesthetic way of knowing’ (Greenwood, 2012): the researcher investigates a research question through artistic creating during data gathering/generation and/or analysis/translation and/or presentation. Autoethnography studies ‘the culture of self’ (Ricci, 2003), or others through self, encouraging “researchers to start with their own lived experiences as a way of uncovering new ways of knowing and understanding wider cultural beliefs” (Gray, 2011, p.67). The unpredictable adventures that arise when these methodologies are blended and used in conjunction with CAT awakens excited trepidation within me. I wish to infuse some of this frisky frisson into the journey we shall embark upon in this chapter and so I externalise this hope by arts-making in which I juxtapose unexpected media: apple, glitter and plasticine (figure 2).
Figure 2. Deborah Green 2019 “The paradox of a juicy journey...” Sugar paper, plasticine, apple, glitter, thread, digital alterations.
Experimenting with unexpected juxtapositions of ABR and autoethnography – including repurposing an increasing range of CAT processes as research – opens two juicy avenues for curiosity. Firstly, I wonder how we creative arts therapists (CATs) breathe our unique practice of arts-as-therapy into the arts within ABR and our unique knowledge of psychotherapy into the psyche-of-self within autoethnography. And secondly, I wonder how engaging with these research approaches may enhance our clinical practice of CAT. I thus entangle the poietic-praxis (Green, 2018) of these performative methodologies (Haseman, 2006) under the investigational umbrella-term abr+a (arts-based research through autoethnography).
Figure 3.
Deborah Green 2020 “the essence of abr+a”. Digital collage.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Poiesis: A Greek word that means roughly the same as ‘art ’ in English, both signifying a medium and a making. This term is used to make-strange, expose hidden assumptions and arouse fresh insights. When applied to both therapy and creative research, poiesis implies the human capacity to respond to and change the world through the act of shaping what is given.
Worlding: An embedded and enacted process, a way of being in the world, an individual's whole-person act of ‘staying with the trouble’ and attending to the world that removes the boundaries between subject and environment.
Diffraction: A term used metaphorically and methodologically within feminist and new materialist research to indicate a critical and difference-attentive approach in which emergent ideas overlap, interfere with, and co-establish one another and divergences are encouraged.
Sympoiesis: A concept that embraces intersubjectivity combined with creative arts-making. Sympoiesis means ‘making with’ and infers ‘becoming with’.
Decentering: The use of creative making to move from stuckness into the alterative logic of the imagination.
Creative Arts Therapist (CAT): A term adopted by ANZACATA to recognise the range of modalities used by uni-modal and multi-modal arts therapists within the regions of Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Terminology used in other countries and regions may vary and may include art therapy, arts therapy, expressive arts therapy and creative therapy.
Reflexivity: Critical examination of the impact of the researcher’s/therapist’s worlding (taken-for-granted values, assumptions, and behavioural patterns and practices) upon research/therapeutic processes. Reflexivity may also include feedback loops that explore the reciprocal influence of these processes upon researcher/therapist’s worlding.