Celeste Ingrams

This creative practice research project explored notions of community, shared meaning-making, and place through dialogue and inquiry around care practices. The work was approached through autoethnography, centering personal experience within critique of cultural context, and engagement with two different participant groups:

• Working with care-experienced individuals (alongside the artists own care-experience) focused on a shared retelling of perspectives of living in a Therapeutic Community children’s home.

• Interviews with creative health practitioners generated a multi- faceted view on care practices within arts and health work which supported considerations on infrastructure of care in creative health projects.

There was a strong emphasis on critically considering the artists position as practitioner in the power dynamics within the dialogue and culture intersecting with two different communities. They mapped and critiqued ethical perspectives and dualities with the care and intervention within the research. The process was informed by body- focused practices to track the changes, learning and evolution of the project. This primary research involved movement, writing, drawing, audio-work to realise and record bodily responses to material and metaphor of place, imbedding embodied approaches of thinking-through.

The generated outputs from the project took the form of video, drawing and a digital zine. Woven through the works are questions about how we restore ourselves to encompass a multi-faceted and deepened relationship with our bodies and/in place. An overarching concern for the project was to explore the use of dialogue and witnessing in countering the isolation, fragmentation and disconnection that regularly occurs within the care-experienced community.

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