Working multimodally to experience, make, and come to know through creative relationships

Amanda E Woodford

I formed this multimodal text in response to my colleague Dr Ariel Moy’s explainer on working multimodally, published here in JoCAT (Moy, 2023). In a draft of Ariel’s work, she wrote, “working multimodally to experience, make, and come to know through creative relationships”. To respond, I returned to an experience of inquiring during my Professional Doctorate in Therapeutic Arts Practice studies. I selected a ‘creative relationship’ from my data-gathering inquiry work with participant Anouk. I took the following images from my arts-making journal and the data postcard I sent to Anouk as an intersubjective response. I added words beneath the photos to describe how I worked multimodally to experience and make, which resulted in me learning more about Anouk’s experience of living with her on-going pain, through the creative relationship.

The postcard Anouk sent me, which described an experience of her pain that month and to which I was responding to, can be seen on page 504, Vol. 3 of the research, An artistic holding of mended bodies in pain. A form of mending through therapeutic arts-based inquiries (Woodford, 2023). Through this way of researching, I gained an embodied sense of Anouk’s experience, different from when I first encountered her postcard image and poetic words. I felt the difficulty and emotions that Anouk described more closely than looking alone could give. I felt a version of the pain in my body, shaping my response to Anouk and our continued dialogue.