(Mis)Interpreting Arts and Health: What (Else) Can an Arts Practice Do?

This research project concerns arts practices in healthcare settings and the encounter between artist, researcher, healthcare professional and institution. Rather than understanding arts practices as either therapeutic or recreational services, this research asks instead, what (else) can an arts practice do? This is accomplished by connecting two previously separate bodies of scholarship; health sociology and an art criticism of expanded arts practices. By connecting these bodies of scholarship, this inquiry offers a new conceptual language and orientation for arts and health practitioners distinct from the evidence-based practice model most prevalent in academic and professional discourses and consequently establishes a transdisciplinary trajectory for artistic and research practices. Navigating between polemical art critical discourses and appropriating health discourses the research seeks to follow a generative path, to create a position of affirmation, where art encounters can be understood in the way they produce affects, defined by how they connect and transform, by what they do. Such an approach addresses a lacuna in scholarship created by the almost exclusive academic interest in impact studies and the sparseness of associated critical writing. The research inquiry then makes a contribution to knowledge of relevance to artists, researchers, healthcare professionals and institutions because it offers an expanded conceptual vocabulary and scope for art practices in healthcare settings

Arts practices in unreasonable doubt? Reflections on understandings of arts practices in healthcare contexts

This article suggests that the discourse on arts and health encompass contemporary arts practices as an active and engaged analytical activity. Distinctions between arts therapy and arts practice are made to suggest that clinical evidence-based evaluation, while appropriate for arts therapy, is not appropriate for arts practice and in effect cast them in unreasonable doubt. Themes in current discourse on “arts” and “health” are broadly sketched to provide a context for discussion of arts practices. Approaches to knowledge validation in relation to each domain are discussed. These discourses are applied to the Irish healthcare context, offering a reading of three different art projects; it suggests a multiplicity of analyses beyond causal positive health gains. It is suggested that the social turn in medicine and the social turn in arts practices share some similar pre-occupations that warrant further attention