Collaborative Artmaking Research Articles

Collaborative and side-by-side artmaking: reducing social isolation in refugee youth group art therapy

ABSTRACT Background Research on social isolation in refugee youth is important because it affects their sense of belonging, mental health and wellbeing; integration and acculturation into a new country; education; and future employment opportunities. There is limited art therapy research in Australia in this area, leaving a compelling gap in understanding the effectiveness of collaborative and side-by-side artmaking in group art therapy to connect refugee youth with their peers. Aims This study aimed to explore whether collaborative and side-by-side artmaking in group art therapy would connect youth more effectively; alleviate their social isolation from trauma, displacement and re-settlement experiences; provide a safe environment and platform to express themselves; and improve their mental health and wellbeing. Methods The triangular mixed-methods approach used standardised scales and semi-structured interviews to gather information from youth, teachers and art therapists. Mixed-method data analysis was applied using the Reliable Change Index, line graphs, descriptive statistics, and thematic analysis. Results Refugee youths’ self-esteem and confidence seemed to increase through collaborative and side-by-side artmaking. Results highlighted the importance of social connection, self-esteem, confidence and a sense of safety for making positive connections during artmaking. Conclusions Findings indicate potential benefits of pportunities for refugee youth to connect with their peers in the school environment and of group art therapy. Implications for practice and future research Opportunities could be achieved through collaborative and side-by-side artmaking in group art therapy. A larger study, longer programme and mixed populations in the school setting are recommended for future research. Plain-language summary The research aimed to examine if there was an effect of a six-week art therapy programme on social isolation for five 14–15-year-old female refugee youth. This research is important because social isolation affects youth’s mental health and wellbeing. Through creating art individually and next to each other (side-by-side artmaking), and creating artworks together (collaborative artmaking), the programme aimed to reduce social isolation and increase connections between youth during the sessions and in the school environment. The research was conducted in an early intervention creative therapies service onsite at a Queensland English-language transition secondary school. The service is provided by accredited art therapists and uses creative methods to support culturally diverse refugee youth in resettling, learning and recovering from trauma and stress. During the research, youth participants engaged in art activities, such as drawing and painting, while listening to music. Interventions were designed to establish group bonds, build self-esteem and resilience, and empower youth in a safe and supportive environment. Art therapists and teachers observed youth during the research period, completed standardised scales before and after the programme and participated in semi-structured interviews. The youth participants also completed standardised scales and were interviewed before and after the programme. The results showed that after the six-week programme, youths’ wellbeing and connections to each other increased. Three central themes were identified: (1) social connection is important within the school environment; (2) self-esteem and confidence are related to connecting to others and social isolation; and (3) there is a sense of safety in artmaking individually and collaboratively with peers. The study found that the art therapy programme positively affected youth mental health and wellbeing. This suggests the programme effectively reduced participants’ social isolation, potentially offering positive opportunities to connect other youth at risk of social isolation.

Review: Self Help Graphics at Fifty: A Cornerstone of Latinx Art and Collaborative Artmaking, edited by Tatiana Reinoza and Karen Mary Davalos

Review: <i>Self Help Graphics at Fifty: A Cornerstone of Latinx Art and Collaborative Artmaking</i>, edited by Tatiana Reinoza and Karen Mary Davalos

Engaging visual diaries in early childhood nature play as pedagogical arousal

This paper explores one element of a multi-faceted project that sought to investigate nature play in early childhood, namely the creation and co-creation of visual diaries by educators, children and academics. The methodology was participatory cartography, which involved the creation of visual and verbal mappings of nature play pedagogies by early childhood educators and academics, as well as visual mappings of nature play experiences by 4-5-year-old children. The visual diary supported, articulated, portrayed and documented the implementation of nature play pedagogies (by the educators), the experiences of nature play (by the children) and the analysis of data (by the academics). This paper explores this methodological slice of the project. It asserts that the visual diary is a useful, arousing and potentially aesthetic inquiry, documentary and resource apparatus for educators, enabling collaborative artmaking moments with children.

Storying itinerant childhoods: weaving a sense of belonging through collaborative art-making

ABSTRACT Storying itinerant childhoods explores belonging through intergenerational collaborative art-making and through a short film; an audio-visual family (auto)ethnography of our travels through North Eastern Australia in 2021. Bobi, a white Australian/British child, born on Bundjalung Country but no longer living there; where does she belong? Thinking-with the conversations that emerge as we draw and spend time as/in nature on Country, as well as Alys' basket weaving from natural materials gathered, develops a storying of our family towards tangled belongings. We share stories of animals, the environment, new homes and a new cousin being born. Researching with response-ability makes space for the more-than-human world, giving respect to Bobi’s 2-year-old voice, avoiding a divide between children and nature, towards a making of childhood nature. The picture-book, Baby Business by Jasmine Seymour has a clear message that ‘we are Country’, helping to highlight Indigenous Knowledges into this settler-colonial-academic paper by viewing the art-journal, the shells collected, the film, the journey and conversations as a relational-assemblage. Childhood now is affected by climate change, therefore we argue for a belonging-with the world as Country. This is the climatehood turn, enabling resilience and self-sufficiency within an ethic of mobility mirroring broader patterns of climate change.

Bridging generations through collaborative artmaking: From design to art therapy

One problem that plagues an ageing society like Singapore is the generation gap. Such a gap could be precipitated by misconceptions and ageism arising from reduced intergenerational contact. This article explores the use of arts-based interventions to encourage intergenerational interactions. Through the blending of design and art therapy principles, the authors propose a novel design framework for intergenerational practice. Based on the proposed framework, a series of design interventions (i.e. Ageless Dreams, Memory Catcher and Rippling Conversations) was developed. These interactive prototypes were designed to facilitate the sharing of narratives and memories among intergenerational audiences through interactive play and collaborative artmaking. Case studies with families and art therapy groups were conducted to explore the potentialities of the framework and prototypes. The co-creation processes resulted in an array of unique artefacts of expression (structures, drawings and marble art prints), each embodying different meanings and stories. Documented findings suggest that the activities facilitated positive emotions, meaning-making and inclusivity. The process of collaborative artmaking allowed the groups to create a shared language of their own, establishing an effective line of communication to foster greater intergenerational understanding.

Together in Spirit: Collaborative Art-Making Across Time and Space

Together in Spirit: Collaborative Art-Making Across Time and Space

Making Mermen in Matanzas, Cuba: Anthropomorphomania, A/r/tography, and Posthuman Queer Aquapelagic Imaginaries

Abstract: By examining Cuban art through instances of posthumanism and wildness, while in conversation with queer theory, mythology, religion, and ocean-based perspectives, we develop new ways of understanding and resolving untellable tales of everyday life. Through collaborative artmaking with Matanzas artist Gíorge Míchel Mílíán Maura, I attempt to understand and reveal vernacular perspectives of Cuban masculinities while defining and engaging with a posthuman queer aquapelagic imaginary. This is an ethnographic study of the subaltern (relating to undocumented interprovincial and international migration, underground economies, and sex work), using art and artmaking to address issues of affect, queerness, and everyday life.

Making Mermen in Matanzas, Cuba: Anthropomorphomania, A/r/tography, and Posthuman Queer Aquapelagic Imaginaries

Abstract: By examining Cuban art through instances of posthumanism and wildness, while in conversation with queer theory, mythology, religion, and ocean-based perspectives, we develop new ways of understanding and resolving untellable tales of everyday life. Through collaborative artmaking with Matanzas artist Gíorge Míchel Mílíán Maura, I attempt to understand and reveal vernacular perspectives of Cuban masculinities while defining and engaging with a posthuman queer aquapelagic imaginary. This is an ethnographic study of the subaltern (relating to undocumented interprovincial and international migration, underground economies, and sex work), using art and artmaking to address issues of affect, queerness, and everyday life.

The Humble Chair: Fostering Culturally Humble Collaborations

The authors recount a collaborative art-making journey centered on self-reflexivity to sustain a partnership across racial, social, and cultural differences. The image of a chair, re-imagined as a Humble Chair, was a symbol to anchor critical inquiry. The authors’ explorations provide a pragmatic and artful approach to fostering cultural humility.

Communicating as Community: Examining Power and Authority in Community-focused Environmental Communication through Participatory Action Research in the Ourimbah Creek Valley

In this paper we argue that the making of meaning is a powerful creative act that occurs within social and cultural contexts where there exists a multi-directional flow or interconnected relationships within a system of communication (McIntyre, 2012). This little explored set of ideas echoes Rogers and Kincaid’s earlier systems-based proposition that “the communication process has no beginning and no end, only the mutually defining relationship among the parts which give meaning to the whole” (1981, pp. 55-56). Similarly, Ali et al. have suggested that the “holistic, relational, interactional, and process-nature of Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies resemble the tenets of systems theory” (2022). With this theoretical foundation in place – located in complex and interconnected systems rather than a Western reductionist worldview (Gadgil et al, 1993) – this project uses action research as a methodology, reframing participants from ‘subjects’ to co-researchers. We assert that “people’s right and ability to have a say in decisions which affect them and claim to generate knowledge about them” (Reason and Bradbury, 2011, p. 9) can empower them on multiple levels to enact change (Freire, 1970; Reason, 2005; Reason and Bradbury, 2011). From this position, “we acknowledge our lives are in connection with multitudes of other beings” (Weir, 2012, p. 4) and that many of the key concepts of this project are rooted in Indigenous knowledges. As such, traditional notions of top-down power are challenged in favour of an even and diffuse power distribution within a communication act (Foucault, 1980). The specific act of communication under examination is found in the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) and various communications to the public concerning the necessity of preserving threatened species. The DPIE’s perception of a lack of public awareness led to the planning and execution of a pilot programme to engage public understanding and acceptance of the issues faced (PRIA, 2011). The project team, including DPIE and Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council, set out to create a participatory community of inquiry in the Ourimbah Creek Valley, located on the Central Coast of New South Wales. This valley is home to 48 threatened fauna species and at least 12 threatened flora species and is critical to their survival. To engage with this action-research approach, residents were invited to a workshop which included a site visit, a bush-food inspired morning tea, and a collaborative art-making activity to share knowledge and build community awareness of and encourage stewardship of two threatened species. This paper reports on the findings of this action-research process.

Facilitated arts engagement with women veterans for health and well-being

To demonstrate the health and well-being benefits of facilitated arts engagement with women veterans, we draw on a key practice-based example from the Australian National Veterans Arts Museum (ANVAM), an organization with expertise in collaborative art-making with veterans. We outline ANVAM’s framework and the processes art therapists use to create facilitated art exhibitions. We discuss how veterans’ involvement with art-making has therapeutic benefits, can contribute new knowledge on health and well-being, and convey nuances of gender-specific experiences. We briefly outline the trend in evidence from academic literature on arts-health research with veterans and the sparse creative research with women veterans to highlight the potential of art-based methods in veteran health and well-being research, given growing numbers and the expanding roles of women in defence. Arts-health research using diverse methods has yielded promising results in this field. As such, interdisciplinary, co-designed, and strength-based art-based research with women veterans can add to knowledge co-creation on this topic.

Surprise! Learning to Communicate and “let go” through Collaborative Artmaking

Surprise! Learning to Communicate and “let go” through Collaborative Artmaking

Sociosonic Interventions: Distributed Authorship in Socially Engaged Sound Practices

How do creative sound practices function in the context of socially engaged art? Toward developing a practical methodology, this paper focuses on sound-led projects that stage socially engaged art practice in community settings, including some involving the author. Aesthetics, ethics and politics are employed as interrogative lenses for distributed creative processes. Methods for collaborative art-making that facilitate a balance between these lenses are discussed, with the author further arguing the necessity of artistic “disruption.” Such sociosonic interventions are demonstrated to occur most effectively when sound practices challenge the paradigm of unidirectional audial reproduction: rupturing traditional hierarchies of creator and listener.

Shared Aesthetics: A Commentary on Collaborative Art

Shared Aesthetics: A Commentary on Collaborative Art

Commentary: Art Ignites Change

Commentary: Art Ignites Change

Cultivating Passion through Collaborative Art: A Dialogic Exploration of Disability, Storytelling, and Social Change

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the role of art and storytelling in organizing expressive and vocational opportunities for individuals with developmental disabilities. Passion Works is a non-profit organization that fosters collaborative art-making among people with differing abilities. Guided by an asset-based approach titled the Creative Abundance Model, the studio challenges deficit-based narratives that guide traditional programming in sheltered workshops for individuals with developmental disabilities. The studio functions as an incubator of discovery, a process central to fostering individual well-being and social change.

"Being Ready for What you Don't Know": A Conversation with Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

"Being Ready for What you Don't Know"A Conversation with Beatriz Santiago Muñoz Ren Ellis Neyra (bio) and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (bio) beatriz santiago muñoz is a Puerto Rican, Antillean artist. A filmmaker and writer, she has made some fifteen films in rainforests, on small farms, along coasts, and on decommissioned U.S. Naval bases of Puerto Rico. After years of study at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she returned to live and work in Puerto Rico. She has continued to roam, making place-specific, clinamenic films and collaborating with other practitioners and artists in Chiapas, Caxias do Sul, Glasgow, San Francisco, Port-au-Prince, and elsewhere. Click for larger view View full resolution Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Photograph by the artist. In the summer of 2016, her solo show at the New Museum, That which identifies them like the eye of the Cyclops, featured two films—in digital and 16mm formats—as well as sculptures and masks, a large broadside text interview, and an archival space for reading and watching documentation relating to Monique Wittig, whose novelistic and poetic fantasy Les Guérillères (1969) was a partial inspiration for the show, and the source of its title.1 Earlier in 2016, María Elena Ortiz beautifully curated the exhibition A Universe of Fragile Mirrors at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the title [End Page 1] of which comes from an interview with the French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch. The show generated a book by the same name. Far from a mere collection of still images, it is a book with a compelling design containing text, visuals—including selections that meditate on military photography's afterlives, rituals, and almost-films—and invocations of sound experiments done on U.S. Naval bases in and around the making of several films.2 Santiago Muñoz is also a cofounder of the San Juan-based independent art space, Beta-Local. Since stepping down as a codirector, she has organized the seminario itinerante [itinerant seminar] in relation to Beta-Local. The itinerant seminar is a cohabitational and collaborative art-making, theorizing, and movement practice. The seminar also involves walking for miles as well as camping, cooking, sharing resources, and sleeping outside as a group. In the summer of 2015, I participated in the itinerant seminar in Vieques with Santiago Muñoz and about twenty other artists and writers. And again, in the summer of 2017, I returned to Vieques and participated with a smaller group, some of us returning to continue specific projects begun two years before. This detail of my participation in the itinerant seminars is relevant to my proximity to the subject of this interview, and our discussions of what I imagine as sensorial and slow errancy. Slow, sensorial errancy is crucial to how Santiago Muñoz's cinema imaginatively materializes lost and diasporic archives of insurgency against U.S. claims to violent sovereignty in Puerto Rico. It is also central to the organization of the itinerant seminars, which practice errancy not only by walking, but also through sensorial reorientations—visceral perceptive adjustments that come from slowly moving through spaces overdetermined by colonial narratives. In a place where the ocean floors and public beaches hold traces of U.S. Naval invasion, where beaches are increasingly privatized for corporatized tourism, and where the local government recently made camping illegal in some public spaces as a strategy for controlling prolonged public protests, the itinerant seminars enact corporeal, sensorial, cohabitational, and aesthetic refusals of the claims of laws invented and enforced in foreign interests. Ideas flare in this interview's imaginary about forms of aesthetic militancy that fire deviant possibilities, such as collaboration, friendship, mutual aid, and listening to places. While masculinist lines of reason and masterful fantasies of universal critical distance still loaf around the halls of Academe, the flows of my and Beatriz's lines of conversation move otherwise in this interview: friendship is not an enabling force, and certainly [End Page 2] not a simplifying force.3 The geographical, aesthetic, and historical forces that shape our friendship place another kind of pressure on how we enact(ed) this...

Resilience Beyond Risk: Youth Re-defining Resilience Through Collective Art-Making

There is a strong parallel between the discursive construction of youth and the definition of resilience, with shared characterizations of deficit, risk and adversity. The purpose of this study was to explore the possibility of redefining resilience by incorporating youth’s own conceptualizations and experiences through collaborative art-making. Twenty-three youth (16–29 years old) participated in art-making workshops guided by six youth researchers, who also assisted with data collection. While youth participants were strongly impacted by external forces imposing a normative assumption of ‘successful youthhood,’ they actively sought out both unique subjectivity and solidarity to counter the negative forces threatening their well-being. The findings suggest that these young people perceive resilience as a crucial component of identity management. Acknowledging youth perceptions of resilience as an intersubjective process of identity negotiation, rather than a personality trait or a buildable capacity for coping, may provide valuable guidance to social work professionals.

Imagineering: Re-Creating Spaces through Collaborative Art-Making

Abstract This paper considers the significance of the types of learning relationships developed between children and adults during a creative arts and engineering project: The Imagineerium. It focuses on data collected through observations, 18 interviews conducted during and six weeks after the pupils had been involved in the project, and 25 interviews conducted one year later. This is supported by reference to a wider data set gathered from questionnaires, field notes and journal analysis conducted with 72 pupils. A significant and recurring feature emerging from this data was pupils’ perception of the positive relationships they experienced within The Imagineerium project. The article considers the elements of the project that contribute to this relational experience. In particular, it argues the importance of this educational experience being located within a tradition of community arts, within the practice of art-making and involving adult facilitators committed to these practices.

Collaborative art-making for reducing marginalisation and promoting intercultural education and inclusion

ABSTRACTThe main goal of this study is to examine how teachers and students experienced the implementation of educational activities, materials and related pedagogical strategies of collaborative art-making. The activities were designed to strengthen intercultural education and inclusion practices, reduce social and academic marginalisation and increase the participation of marginalised children in the curricula, cultures and societies of schools. The current study examines only the implementation of activities in Cyprus. The findings of this study suggest that collaborative art-making allowed the voices of culturally diverse students to be heard, promoting the exchange of ideas and stories regarding diversity. Additionally, the implementation of the activities led to the development of students’ civic efficacy and democratic agency, while it contributed to friendship development.