Introduction

Moving Space draws on ideas and practices from experiential learning, and the arts therapies to use art making as research to explore and express personal experience and promote health and wellbeing.

The website is intended to provide materials to support this and invite conversation and collaboration.

Background

This work has been developed through 40+ years of professional work with experiential and outdoor learning in a variety of education, therapy and care settings in the UK, EU and USA, guided by professional training as a teacher, counsellor and HCPC registered Drama and Movement Therapist, and supported by a decade of personal art practice researching arts for health indoors and out.

Art, the outdoors and health are the three key themes that comprise the content of this website and the work of Moving Space.

What follows is a kind of benchmark for what art, the outdoors and health mean on this site and for Moving Space.

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Art

Art as Research

Essentially, I am proposing that art making is the most accessible means by which to research personal experience. It is research you can do with a sketchbook and a pencil. You do not need a research lab and a PhD.

Research as a singular descriptor brings together a lot of the ideas and practices that comprise the content of the site. The content of the site has been

Art making is…

research (v.)

1590s, “to investigate or study (a matter) closely, search or examine with continued care,” from French recercher, from Old French recercher “to seek out, search closely,” from re-, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see re-), + cercher “to seek for,” from Latin circare “to go about, wander, traverse,” in Late Latin “to wander hither and thither,” from circus “circle” (see circus).

From Etymonline

It describes art as a verb, a doing thing. It supports the idea of art making as an intentional and concerted search or investigation. It supports the idea of it being a bit of an adventure, a wandering journey where we don’t know what we are going to find. It supports the idea of having a circular or recursive quality. What we find in our search feeds forward into the next act of searching and finding. It also has, through ‘circus’, connections to performance.

It supports the idea of art making as a way of researching personal experience. This emerges directly out of experiential learning and the arts therapies. It focuses on the process of making art rather than the product made. In this, it can promote wellbeing, make art a form of experiential learning, and when done outdoors, deepen and expand the experience of being outdoors.

Art is Anything You Make as Art as Long as it is Art.

The emphasis is on doing art more than viewing art, on art as a verb rather than a noun, and on art as a process more than a product. You make art, attend to what you make and what happens when you make it. Art is anything you make as long as it is art. You draw on the work of other artists, of art you like, and you make it your own. The art making is seen as a form of research, exploring and expressing personal experience. You may show and share if you wish, but this is not seen as the end point. The point is to make something yourself, for yourself.

Treat Art Making as Experiential Learning

Art making as a way to promote wellbeing is best undertaken as a way of learning from the experience of making art. The art is the experience.

When I worked with climbing or expeditioning participants, the learning to climb or hike was not the point. Sure, people learned new skills, but mostly what they learned from the experience of climbing was to overcome fears, or from expeditioning was to work as a team. When I worked as a Dramatherapist using dance, the non-speaking clients learned new ways to move. Movement and gesture were often their only means of communicating. In the absence of words, they found that their movement vocabulary was extended. They learned new ways to communicate. On the climb, on the expedition, on the dance floor, the experience of the clients was the source of their own learning. So it is with art making. You learn to make art in the experience of making art. What you learn is down to you, your art and your experience making it.

Treat Art Making as a Therapeutic Experience

If you make your own art to make you well, you are not doing therapy, but the experience can be therapeutic. At its most basic level, to make art, attend to what you make and what happens when you make it is a form of mindful meditation. It is intention, attention and attitude, the core of meditative practice. You intend to make art, you attend to what you make and what happens when you make it and you do so with an attitude of openness to what may happen. An absence of skill to knowledge enhances the openness. Tom Waits for example, always seeks to use new instruments he cannot play, or to find ways of making new instruments for his music. He says this helps him find some new thing to do with his music.

Learning that you can learn some new thing is intrinsically therapeutic. It is an act of moving on. That your personal art making facilitates this process through the same principles as mindful meditation supports the principle that the act of making is as important as the thing you make. It is in the process. Whatever ails thee is exposed to your knowledge that, by making some new thing, you can make some new thing happen. There is a movement in your vocabulary. Your art has done some new thing so you can say some new thing. You witness yourself doing some new thing. You know from experience that you can make yourself change.

Also, if you are anxious about art making, the principles of the arts therapies also apply. Arts therapies take place in a closed space. If you make art nobody sees but yourself, whatever you make as art never leaves your sight. It is never open to being called ’not art’, ‘not good’, ‘not skilled enough’. Nor are you. It is still art, because you made it as art. It becomes part of your personal arts practice. You are an art maker.

Steal Art and Make it Your Own

The emphasis is on you making art. For this, you do not need to be an artist or skilled in art making. You may well look to what is called ‘Art’, or ‘Fine Art’, and made by a professional ‘Artist’. All artists start with theft. They use what are called ‘source materials’, images of established artists work, or they learn the chords of their favourite musician, or they read the poems of a favourite poet. Jean-Luc Godard the French New-Wave film-maker said ‘It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.’ In his book ‘Steal Like as Artist’, Austin Kleon quotes Picasso as saying ‘All art is theft.’, David Bowie is quoted as saying ‘The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from.’

When you make art you take some thing you like and make some new thing of it. Just look on YouTube about how to use oil paint, or how to make beats for your poem to turn it into a rap, or how to edit your photographs. Just do something. Make something and see what happens. Some thing will happen. Some thing will come into existence that did not previously exist. Inhabit and enjoy the experience of making it.

Outdoors

The outdoors is the place outside your front door

The outdoors is a creative Place. Even in the most urban of settings, if you venture outside, over time some thing will change. One day it is dry, the next it is wet. Last week it was cold, now it is warm. Your indoor space keeps you dry and warm over time. We hope our indoor spaces are safe and consistent. Sadly for some people they are not. For many people I worked with who inhabited unsafe home spaces, the consistency of outdoor spaces was a great boon. They liked that it was consistent in the way it changed. It remained unmoved by whatever ailed them indoors. The outdoors, like art, is paradoxical. Both are intrinsically creative.

An Inclusive Place

Much is made of the health benefits of green spaces, of exposure to nature and natural environments. For example, evidence shows that exposure to Phytoncides, which help plants fight disease, when we breathe forest air, help our bodies make white blood cells, which help us fight disease. But in proposing exposure to nature and natural environments, to forests, to green space, whilst evidentially beneficial, has intrinsic limits for many people. Most people live in cities. Also the identification to ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ has to me always been a bit academic and open to interpretation. It is useful, and easily understood, but in the spirit of creativity, of seeing things with new eyes, I suggest that it has become a bit of a trope.

So my proposal is that to work simply with ‘The Outdoors’ seems much simpler, more concrete. It is that space outside your front door. It is unequivocal. It is a concrete place, not an abstract idea or an evidential phenomenon. I have run several ‘urban outdoor programmes’ in which the outdoors was canoeing on a canal full of traffic cones and discarded tyres. I have been on Alpine mountain tops and seen the same crowds of shouting crows as I see on the tops of city tower blocks. ‘Nature’ is everywhere. Do the bugs eat your beans in your garden in the city? They do, they are part of some bigger ecosytem displaying biodiversity over urban and rural spaces. The bugs don’t care about Phytoncides. They are hungry everywhere. ‘Nature’ is a philosophical construct. The Outdoors is a physical place.

In urban settings, the street is outdoors. The street can be heaving with people of all races and creeds. The street can be a vibrant outdoor setting full of human diversity. Often, rural spaces run on low levels of human diversity. The outdoors can be dangerous and replete with adventure. So can urban spaces. All that is different is the nature of the danger and adventure. The act of going ‘outside’ seems to me to be more inclusive than being exposed to nature.

The Other Place

What makes the outdoors valuable is its ‘otherness’, it’s act of constantly changing whilst being also being consistently unchanging, it’s being just outside your window or your door, yet extending to the ends of the universe. Its otherness invites other ways of experiencing. Art does the same thing. The outdoors and art are both dialectic, thus both are containers for change. Our indoor spaces are human-made spaces, controlled by us. The outdoors is home to the more than human world. To step outdoors makes you a guest in their home. To step outdoors, you become a visitor, a foreigner. This, like art, promotes the scope for reflection on who you are. You become changed by a step change out the door.

Like a health benefit of art making is just making art and attending to what happens when you make it, a health benefit of the outdoors is just being in it and attending to what happens when you are in it. With its weather, its daily darkening, its consistently changing seasons, its capacity to be warm, wet, cold and dry on four different days or even in an hour of a day, provides for consistent exposure to new things and new experiences. It can be a mountain top and a street corner, a flowerbed in a park and a forest far away. Most of my art making outdoors has been either outside my front door, within walking distance, or under a half-hour drive away. Art making, like the outdoor experience, is always accessible.

A Place Just A Step Away

Avoiding the trap of assuming one needs to be an ‘Artist’ to make art mirrors avoiding the trap of assuming one needs to be exposed to ‘Nature’ to be outdoors. It’s all a bit too academic and conditional, a thing defined. It is all a bit prone to gatekeeping and control, a thing permitted. You can experience the health benefits art and the outdoors without an evidentially significant ‘control group’ or some controlling opinions of what is or what is not ‘Art’. Make art! Step outdoors! Anyone can do it. What benefits accrue are due to what you do. You make it and you make it happen. The outdoors is a step away.

Place and Space

Place and Space provide some very useful ideas linking art making and the outdoors. Emerging originally out of my degree in Human Ecology and the humanistic geography ideas of Y-Fu Tuan, the assumption is that our use of space and place is relational, and we start with an empty space which we make into our place.

I suggest that place is followed by polis, the Greek name for a governed city-state. Now in polis, the place we occupy is subject to influence by people other than ourselves. Art making follows a similar sequence. I start with a blank canvas. The canvas becomes my painting. Then my painting may be placed in the public domain. In art making for health and the arts therapies, the sequence ends at place, a safe place over which I/we have control. For fine art, the sequence ends at polis, a place over which I have no control. We may choose to go from place to polis but we do so with intention regarding to our health and wellbeing.

More recently, the idea of the more-than-human world extended this. When we enter or occupy the outdoors, we do so as a place that is already home to the more-than-human world. It is already occupied. This supports a post-humanist perspective. Art making outdoors helps us connect and co-create with the more-than-human world. The closer we are to our own home, the more the place we enter is co-occupied by the more-than-human world. This helps us gauge what art to make outdoors. We may thus seek to conduct our outdoor art making in urban and urban fringe settings if our art making is invasive. As a respectful attitude, we still seek to leave nothing but footprints and take nothing but photographs.

Health

Health is your ability to interact well with your environment.

Health is your ability to interact well with your environment. This description of health comes from ideas of mind from Dr. Dan J Siegal which goes thus “The mind is a self-organizing, emergent, embodied and relational process that arises from and regulates energy and information within the body we live in, between our self & other people, and with the planet.” Siegal’s description is integrative, suggesting the mind, the body, other people and the place we live are inseparable parts of our health and wellbeing. This fits well with using art making and outdoor experience to make you well. They will affect mostly your mind but in an integrative way. They will not treat illness the way medical treatment does and may be best understood as an adjunct or complement to allopathic medicine.

Art is Health

This description of the mind also reflects ideas in art as research by artist and researcher Professor Estelle Barrett describes art-based research as an experiential, self-organising, emergent, embodied and relational process. Art making as a way to research personal experience is thus suggested to be integrative, the way Siegal suggests the mind is integrative. It is a good way to explore and express personal experience to promote wellbeing. Siegal offers simple and powerful dyad for describing unwellness. If the process becomes problematic, he suggests it does so by becoming too rigid or too loose. We cannot self-diagnose, but we can attend to whether our ways of integrating with the world are too loose of too rigid. We may, by choosing how we make art, act to counterbalance what we perceive as a state of being out of balance.

Siegal’s description also sees ourselves in relation to other people and our environment. As such, we may not be in control of other people and our environment. To take some lead out of the idea of the social model of disability, such that a person in a wheelchair in seeking access a building, is only disabled by stairs. A ramp or direct access renders them not-disabled. Our ability to integrate with the world in a healthy way, is situational. A situation of poverty, poor sanitation or building quality, lack of access to services or the presence of threat or trauma may render us unable to be fully healthy. A remedy takes more than art making, but in art making, we make an environment with which we can integrate. In his book ‘Will to Power’ Friedrich Nietzsche says ‘We have art in order not to die of the truth.’ I think this is what he means. Art cannot treat illness or threat, but it may help us process the experience of them.

Practice Making Yourself Well

My experience is that art making and outdoor experiences evoke what is known in meditative practice as an ‘approach mentality’. I am through art making, able to approach things that previously seemed to big, or fearful, or uncontrollable. Explored and expressed through art, the art object made, and the process of making it, makes the source handleable. Augusto Boal, theatre practitioner and social activist says ‘It is not the place of theatre to show the correct path, but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined.’

My proposal is that we may replace Boal’s ‘theatre’ with art making as performance, in which we see ourselves in the process of doing and viewing our own experience. We make it concrete through the materiality of the art medium. This renders experience handleable. Long time collaborator with Estelle Barrett, artist and researcher Barbara Bolt has written about the value of art making’s handleability as a source of praxical knowledge, knowing through doing. She says that researching things that concern us, that we care about through art brings understanding, ‘Understanding is the care that comes from handling, of being thrown into the world and dealing with things.’ And the art making is integrated, in relation with the world such that ‘In this relationship, the work of art is the particular understanding that is realised though our concernful dealings with ideas, tools and materials of production. The work of art is not the artwork.’ The art work is the work we do with art regards the thing that concerns us, our own experience. The art is the experience. The experience of art making is the source of our making ourselves well.

Just Keep Going

My Dad called this ‘Nous’. Knowledge gained by doing. He ran British Railways Craft Apprenticeships. Each apprentices first learning task was to learn to file ‘flat and square’, They got five, 1 inch blocks of aluminium, a 1 inch hand file and a vice. The had to make one block an inch by an inch by 7/8 of an inch. The cutoff had to be ‘flat and square’ as measured by a micrometer to a specific tolerance, a specific degree of error. Few did it first time. All did in the end. What they learned was partly about metal, but mostly about how they filed. Each apprentice learned about themself. It was learned through experience. And it took time.

My experience is that the health benefits of my art work to promote my wellbeing were immediately apparent in my own arts practice. But the benefits, apparently, given 10 years practice, were just the first few simple blocks. The more elaborate and difficult engineering came later, often unbidden, but only by continuing to file flat and square. I have learned a lot of interesting stuff along the way, but most interestingly, every new thing I learn, I learn eventually is just an aspect of filing flat and square. So this seems partly futile, but also partly liberating, given that the first thing I learned was the most useful thing. I realised whatever new thing that I learn to do now, that I could do it all along. It is reassuring. It produces, promotes and proves resilience.

For the Journey

In the health practice of ‘Recovery’, one comes to realise one can become ill but recover ones health. But it is best approached as an ongoing journey. Like an adventure, the power of healing is in the walking, the journey, the filing flat and square, the making and attending to what you make and what happens when you make it, the thing that happens before you arrive. As Barbara Bolt says, the art work is not the artwork.