The work of art therapy : an immersive visual analysis

This chapter describes a practice-led exploration of visual art therapists' experience of working with people living with, or dying from, cancer. My study was inspired by clinical work over many years as an independent art therapist, positioned at the intersection of psychotherapeutic practice and the Australian medical world of cancer and palliative care. With four experienced therapist-participants I explored the potential of art-making to go beyond and at times fold back into dialogue, as a powerful way to access knowledge lying outside conscious thought. A novel analytic method emerged organically, using image-making in response to the therapist-participants' data that I call immersive visual analysis. In this method, the image functiions simultaneously as primary data, the method of enquiry and as a point of dialogic and analytic focus. Adopting a phenomenological, heuristic approach made it possible to explore the participants' stories and being-in-the-world, using their own 'text', as a different way of looking at the phenomenon of art-focused work with people experiencing cancer.