Explainer – Working multimodally

Ariel Moy

As arts and creative arts practitioners, our valuing of and work with multiple art and expressive modalities is embedded within our titles. When we work multimodally we experience, make and come to know through creative relationships with various materials, spaces and places, atmospheres, concepts, imaginaries, memories, emotions, technologies, human and more-than-human or posthuman others (Abram, 1996; Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2019; Haraway, 2016; Woodford, 2023). Our coming to know is similarly multiple. We learn and make sense through sensory, kinaesthetic, relational, affective, conceptual, aesthetic and imaginary modes (Heron & Reason, 1997; Leavy, 2020; van Daal, 2021; van der Tuin & Verhoeff, 2022). The sites of this multimodal work might include arts-making/inquiry with clients, but also with students, co-researchers, artists and community groups, and personal sense-making.

In multimodal working we differentiate between materials and modes. Materials refer to the tangible components of our art-making such as clay, paints, instruments, found objects and the tools we use. Modes refer to two different ways of practising: they speak to the creative techniques or practices we engage in and develop when art-making; for example, sculpture, painting, music or sound-making, and performance. Modes can also refer to more general and embodied ways we experience, sense and express ourselves in the world, including movement, hearing, vocalising, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting.

Some arts therapies and research focus on single art modalities, such as drama, music, dance, creative writing or painting. Others may lean into one or two embodied experiential modalities, such as movement, sound-making or haptics (working with touch). Creative arts therapy or multimodal therapeutic practice invites and celebrates the possibility for experiencing and knowing differently that varying arts and embodied experiential modes might produce, including our movements between them. We work across arts and expressive modalities, allowing ourselves and others to be led by and attend to the materials and modes that feel significant in the moment. As Lähdesmäki et al. (2021) note:

Every child lives in a multimodal world… School curricula, however, generally concentrate on reading and writing… Multimodal education, by contrast, is based on the assumption that the literacies of different modes of communication are equally important in learning. (p.32)

We hope to open up possibilities across experiencing and expression to allow for surprise, novelty, complexity, change and deepening understanding.

Working multimodally promotes access to expression for different ages, abilities and inclinations. As an adaptable way of doing and knowing, it accommodates for temporal, environmental and financial limitations on spaces, materials and tools. Further, working, playing, experimenting and researching in multimodal ways is attentive to and generative of resonance and process, enabling forms of knowing and doing that challenge normative knowledge practices and invite awareness of more-than-human dimensions in human experiencing.

JoCAT provides, among an array of offerings, a space for the sharing and cross-pollination of multimodal makings, conceptualisations and practical applications. We bring ourselves to these multiple modes with doings, practices and processes alongside an openness to what might emerge.

This kind of working supports and privileges knowing through creating-with many materials in multiple modes, including the materiality of ourselves. For example, we might embody working multimodally through movement. Annie-B. Parson (2022) writes:

this desire to articulate what you feel and perceive, to tell it, to name it, to describe it, this is as natural as the progression from walking to running to leaping, to shaping that leap into a pattern of leaps, and then a group of leapers in unison - into a dance. (p.94)

Creating and expressing through food preparation and shared eating practices can form and convey knowing of profound importance to ourselves and also to our community. As Kalyanam (2021) explained during the Covid-19 pandemic:

I increasingly reflect on the women in my matriline as knowledge creators, whose healing, love, and care is showing up in my kitchen through my family recipes, to help me survive these ongoing unprecedented and traumatic times, while resisting colonial pressures of assimilation. (p.6)

All human sensory modes and capacities intermingle with all possible materials, arts modes and creativities, informing our process and productions in an infinite number of ways. They also offer various affordances and limitations. We may intentionally or inadvertently choose to work with materials and modes we are not familiar with, to see what unfolds; or we might work with the familiar and comforting, to lessen stress on a body with/in pain (Woodford, 2023).

Haraway’s (2016) ‘sympoiesis’ conveys the lively relationalities at play when human/material/mode co-creations assemble. We pay keen attention to this process of creating-with, because the moment-to-moment doings are a part of the expression ultimately constructed. The story of the art’s coming-in-to-being provides us with insight about what the modalities, materials, tools and artistic forms might have to say. Wrestling and lurching, caressing and careening, we engage in ways that are meaningful to what it is we are inquiring about. Therapeutically, if we’re working with someone exploring, for example, experiences of depression or grief, the ways they encounter and make-with their materials (arts materials, their bodies, the relational shared space, etc.) may have something to say about how they experience that depression or grief (Cameron, 2016; Moy, 2022; Orford Hill, 2023; Schaller, 2020b). The power of this kind of multimodal engagement is in the abundance of opportunities for experiencing and knowing that it invites.

Our felt sense of the qualities, affective textures and intensities, requests, resistances, reinforcements, questions and challenges of materials and modes enables us to lean into our relationship with them and make choices in ongoing responsiveness. We are drawn into an awareness of becoming-with materials and modes (Bush, 2018). This deep relationality contributes to what we and they ultimately express... for now.   

In the process of making-with and engaging with the expression that emerges, working multimodally invites a range of sense-full (d’Emilia et al., 2020) and aesthetic (Bush, 2018; Cameron, 2016; van Daal, 2021; Lett, 2011) possibilities within process, and with what is constructed:

• To be moved, to feel (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Finlay, 2011; Leavy, 2019)

• To illuminate and wonder (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Carmago-Borges, 2018; Leavy, 2020; Rosiek, 2018)

• To reinforce, disturb and question what may have previously been assumed (Carmago-Borges, 2018; Finley, 2018; Leavy, 2020; Sheller, 2015)

• To allow for and be within ambiguity, ambivalence and not quite knowing (Bush, 2018; Finlay, 2011; Gunaratnam, 2007; Leavy, 2018; Leavy, 2020; Lett, 2011; Schaller, 2020)

• To affirm and experience multiplicity and complexity, a becoming-with the materials and artwork (Gunaratnam, 2007; Harris & Rousell, 2022; Rosiek, 2018; Woodford, 2023)

To dance and dawdle, to paint and print, to sing and strum, to bake and brush, to engage in creating-with is to recognise a self that is alive within a vibrant ecosystem seeking expression. And the materials and others in this ecosystem also articulate their being through us. Materials and others can choose us, just as we choose them. Think of that strange moment when a colour or movement calls and we respond. As material beings we are similarly malleable and extensive, co-agential and co-creative.

To work multimodally is to foster experiences and knowing through continuing engagement with and as those expressions after they have been made (McNiff, 2004). We maintain an open dialogue with materials and modes in the forms they currently inhabit, because we will never come to this expression in precisely the same way at precisely the same time again. Another of the riches of working multimodally is in our recognition that this relationship will always have something to give and to receive from us as co-creator and participatory audience.

Ethical considerations are significant here as we become increasingly aware through the news and the arts, through science and our lived environments, of the finite and fragile nature of our world. Working multimodally reminds us that we can make use of all materials around us, salvaging what has been discarded, remembering the material vibrancy (Bennett, 2010) of what has already been used (Woodford, 2023).

Another layer of creative work dapples through our awareness as we wonder into what might be possible with what is already at hand. Vik Muniz, for example, with his photographic series Pictures of garbage (2008), sources waste products to form the images he photographs. In Many came back (2005), El Anatsui uses bottle caps to form a luscious art piece cascading down a wall, and Susan Stockwell uses everyday and used materials to form artworks across installations, sculptures and films. Her Europa (Stockwell, 2023, Home page, para.1), made of maps and cloth, powerfully captures in lifesize sculpture “recent history events in Europe, including the war in Ukraine, Brexit and mass migration.”

Living in a material world (with a nod to Madonna) as beings of matter ourselves, we cannot be short of materials and inspiration to work with, to work through, to work experiencing into knowing and knowing into experiencing, multimodally. As beings of matter, we are always experiencing and knowing multimodally, our senses in complex arrays and relationalities with whatever we interact or intra-act (Barad, 2007) with. Therefore, as Jan Allen notes (personal correspondence, 25 September 2023):

When we (plural intended to imply a vibrant non-human inter-action) paint, we move, we feel textures, we dance, we think and make choices together with colour, tools, surfaces, air, water, and temperatures… each of the arts modalities incorporates the others in some form or another… this is the nature of lively relationalities.

Working multimodally is to work as a human being in a world of possibilities: Porous, playful, presence-full, processual, particular, provocative and precious. The value of being able to traverse and engage with multiple modes, materials and forming is a practice and a way of knowing that is organic, radically accessible, sustainable spatially and temporally, and tenderly inviting.