Journal of Applied Arts & Health - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2013

This article reflects on a pilot project undertaken at the University of British Columbia, Canada, by an interdisciplinary team of researchers and lay and professional artists. The project was an experiment in the use of arts-based methods as a means of disseminating research findings from a five-year funded study entitled ‘Centring the Human Subject in Health Research: Understanding the Meaning and Experience of Research Participation’. Through the creation, performance and/or display of found poetry, drama, song and visual arts, more than 50 researchers and artists collectively presented the experiences of human subjects involved in many types of health research. By way of detailed discussion, this article explores the practice and process of interdisciplinarity as it applies to arts-based health research.

The field of Arts-Health practice and research has grown exponentially in the past 30 years. While researchers are using applied arts as the subject of investigation in research, the evaluation of practice and participant benefits has a limited general focus. In recent years, the field has witnessed a growing concentration on the evaluation of health outcomes, outputs and tangential benefits for participants engaging in Arts-Health practice. The wide range of methodological approaches applied arts practitioners implement make the field difficult to define. This article introduces the term Arts-Health intersections as a model of practice and framework to promote consistency in design, implementation and evaluative processes in applied arts programmes promoting health outcomes. The article challenges the current trend to solely evaluate health outcomes in the field, and promotes a concurrent and multidisciplinary methodological approach that can be adopted to promote evaluation, consistency and best practice in the field of Arts-Health intersections. The article provides a theoretical overview of Arts-Health intersections, and then takes this theoretical platform and details a best model of practice for developing Arts-Health intersections and presents this model as a guide.

This article reports on a pilot project that explored the use of ‘colour’ as a therapeutic intervention that can be used to enhance a sense of personal well-being in adults experiencing mild to moderate mental health problems. The project was designed, delivered and evaluated by an occupational therapist with extensive experience in the therapeutic use of colour within complementary therapy. Over a nine-week period, individuals attending the programme were taught a variety of colour awareness exercises, which could be incorporated within their daily lifestyle. The findings of a follow-up evaluation undertaken twelve months after the Colour for Wellbeing (CfWB) programme began indicates that training in colour awareness is a cost-effective intervention that can positively impact on the mood, behaviour, and sense of mental and physical wellbeing of individuals experiencing mild to moderate mental health issues.

Responding to Derek Jarman’s (1942–1994) film Blue (1994) and written text Chroma: A Book of Colour – June ’93 (1994), this article argues that colour serves as the subject through which notions of visual perception are interrogated and reconsidered. Diagnosed as HIV positive in December 1986, Jarman’s encroaching blindness from retinal disease and eventual death in 1994 frames such discourse on the visual within the political and social landscape of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. For Jarman, his sight literally failed him; but sensory impairment also comes to mirror that cultural ‘blindness’ surrounding the (desired) closeting of gay sexuality and the suffering of those caught up within the epidemic. In particular, Jarman’s film Blue reveals the limitations of language – both spoken and visual – to effectively articulate suffering and pain. Art, too, has its limits when attempting to deal with such concerns. Jarman turns to the complexities of colour in an attempt express, and to make sense of, the senseless loss and tumultuous emotions that punctuated these decades.

This article tells the story and explores the experiences of a group of fourth year medical students led by a theatre director/facilitator at the National University of Ireland Galway in 2012 to create a piece of theatre on a theme directly pertinent to their future careers. It considers the process and decisions made by the facilitator/director, the fine balance required between content and skills, between facilitation and direction, and through the development of the piece how participants opened themselves in a unique way to the power of emotional honesty, teamwork and reconnection to their commitment to heal.

It is increasingly being recognized, both empirically by carers and through rapidly advancing research in music psychology and neuroscience, that music can assist the well-being of people living with dementia. In this article I show my work as a Sesame practitioner, demonstrating my therapeutic use of music and giving examples of how it speaks to the needs of this client group, including those of self-expression and relationship; and I show how music fits into the Sesame context of Drama and Movement, which includes Laban Fundamentals. I give an introduction to Sesame beginning with a vignette from one-to one work that illustrates our practice. I describe a group therapy session from a series, explaining the Sesame session structure and the use of music in relation to this. I detail effects I noted as participant/observer, and my subsequent reflections; I refer throughout to pertinent literature including some recent neuroscientific research.

This article explores how organizations generally marginalize artistic enquiry and reinforce what the author calls ‘Cubicle Mind’. It also examines problems and challenges to researchers in posing questions and applying methods that do not conform to the dominant mindset of the institution or profession, whether corporations, higher education, religious organizations, the military, government or social groups. Artistic enquiry is generally approached as alternative and perhaps risky; its open-ended sense of possibilities, activities and outcomes will be contrasted with the limitations of cubicle mind. Vignettes are drawn from the author’s experience and conversations with colleagues.

DEVELOPING A NARRATIVE APPROACH TO HEALTHCARE RESEARCH, VIV MARTIN (2010) Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing, 198pp., ISBN: 9781846194009, p/bk, £24.99

AN INQUIRY INTO MAKING SENSE OF OUR LIVES, WARREN LETT (2011) Eltham, Australia: Rebus Press, 288 pp., ISBN: 978-0646558752, p/bk, AUS$50.00

LIVING WITH A CREATIVE MIND, JEFF CRABTREE AND JULIE CRABTREE (2011) Australia: Zebra Collective, 325 pp., ISBN: 9780987104601, p/bk AUS$29.95 (e-book AUS$19.95)