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2018

Arts and health is a burgeoning multidisciplinary field involving an array of practices, professionals, and academic disciplines (e.g. art, design, creative therapies, medicine, public health, humanities) interested in exploring and understanding the role and value of creative engagement on health and human flourishing in a variety of setting. Although there has been a growing interest for arts-health practitioners to establish modes of approaches to promote effective practice, there have been limited conceptual models of arts-health practice to guide artists. 

This project addresses this gap and developed a practice framework to promote effective and caring practice. It used a unique mode of practice-led research that combined an arts-health practice with a qualitative action-research case study. This systematic way of inquiry and practice is distinguishable from practices that focus solely on the design and delivery of an art programme. I refer to this systematic inquiry and practice as critical arts-health practice. 

Critical arts-health practice involves undertaking a systematic investigation to evaluate the impact of one’s practice and activities on the participants, to analyse and to reflect on the processes to develop an insider view and insights that can lead to improvements in current practice and professionalisation. Drawing on a relational view of health and wellbeing, health and wellbeing are understood as states constituted by, afforded by and amendable to a network involving the body’s relation and its interaction with other bodies, materialities and processes. In this sense, the gain or depletion of subjective health and wellbeing is affected and effected by encounters, networks and associations according to the availability of enabling resources. In other words, as much as an assemblage affords the body its capacities, it is also capable of delimiting its capacity for action, feeling and desire. 

Informed by these understandings, the project offers reflections on the processes and unpicks the components at play in shaping personal wellbeing outcomes in participatory art sessions. The findings suggest the basis of a practice framework that may promote a caring practice. The practice framework identifies the participants, wellbeing outcomes, the environment and the quality of activities as key concerns of arts-health practice. It also reflects on the link between caring and arts-health practice to highlight several caring attributes that promote a caring arts-health practice. 

The framework has been adopted by the Agency of Integrated Care (Singapore), the national agency for eldercare planning and development, for training of artists in its seminal art residency in nursing home programme (2017), and incorporated in the Spark Art for Wellness Toolkit (2018); Art, Ageing and Wellbeing Toolkit (2020) as a resource the community care sector in Singapore. The toolkits were circulated in print to social care services. Digital versions are also available online for public access.