Medical practice is replete with emotive images and processes in everyday small interactions as well asissues of life and death. Practitioners can be moved in aesthetic ways. The capacity for, and attention to, personal lived aesthetic experience is easily suppressed in clinical practice where the objective evidence base has primacy. Aesthetic experience has been linked with values in different contemporary fields and could thus be important in healthcare. In this research, ‘aesthetic’ refers to sensory perception and the imaginative dimension. ‘Aesthetic experience’ relates to the latter including emotions, the tacit, haptic, pre-reflective and the embodied. To articulate this rich internal complexity, an arts and practice-based approach was employed that was inspired by connective practices from the field of Social Sculpture. The research aims were to explore and describe the nature of a type of aesthetic experience relevant to the everyday work of health care practitioners; to develop and design new participatory processes that activate this for them to observe, describe and reflect on and to evaluate the success of the emergent methodology and design. The background experience of the researcher in both clinical medical and arts-based practice was combined with aspects of practice and theory from other relevant disciplines to create an emergent methodology that was a hybrid of methods synthesised in new practice-based ways. Experience arising directly from practice retained primacy in this research. Practice-based methods were initially developed to explore and describe aesthetic experience in nonclinical settings and then related to clinical examples. The research was then expanded to scoping and pilot studies with participants who were healthcare practitioners, workers in allied fields and postgraduate artists. For these, new experiential processes were designed and tested to activate aesthetic experience in relation to the everyday clinical work of health carers. Participatory immersion aimed to allow participants to explore and describe experience at the time. Ultimately a series of six contemplative experiential participatory processes was finally developed for groups of healthcare workers. Poetic interventions were incorporated to draw attention to sensory and imaginative details of aesthetic experience during participation. Methods of documentation and analysis were designed and developed from first-person reflective practice and participant feedback as the research progressed. A resulting description of aesthetic experience relevant to the everyday work of healthcare practitioners was built and found to be rich in multisensory detail that gave rise to expansive imaginative detail. The latter contained a complexity of components and had the potential for connecting with deeper insights, wider issues and values relating to humane health care. A prototype for a teaching model was given. Practice was an integral part of the research and a portfolio of practice made transparent the details of creative design and evidenced the findings as the research progressed. Whilst these offered a representation, the depth of experience came from participation in the processes themselves. Aesthetic experience in the clinic has not been described in this way before. The emergent methodology called 'Connective Aesthetics in Medicine' extends traditional qualitative ways of knowing by awakening awareness to aesthetic experience during participatory practice. This contributes to: connective aesthetic practices in the field of Social Sculpture, incorporating aspects of human connection with self, other and the environment related to clinic work; the field of Contemporary Aesthetics by describing everyday aesthetic experience of sensing and the arising imaginative dimension in the clinic from empirical findings;offers a simple practical adaptation of aesthetics from models for aesthetic appreciation of nature and landscape;adds to the field of aesthetics in mental health and wellbeing within contemporary aesthetics; extends Valuesbased practice in healthcare offering participatory processes for reflection on values in caregiving and contributes a new application to Abraham’s framework of the functions of the imagination. In the latter, participant feedback in this study demonstrated different components of the imaginative dimension. Drawing these out during reflective inquiry demonstrated the potential of expansive imagination and divergent thinking to bring deeper insights and creative possibilities. This suggests that rather than suppression, awareness and appropriate reflection on aesthetic experience could be a resource. This research also contributed to the field of arts-based research extending into healthcare. It also offered an example of online working in experiential connective processes.
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/zv2m-jt98
Fox, Helena
Supervisors: Sacks, Shelley; Lee, Ray Other contributors: Fulford, Bill
School of Arts
Year: 2023
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