Art, Creativity and Imagination in Social Work Practice

Prue Chamberlayne, Martin Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317990895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Harnessing the inspiration available from the arts and the imagination brings to life sensitive and effective social work practice. Workers feel most satisfied while service users and communities are more likely to benefit when creative thinking can be applied to practice dilemmas. Drawing on contributions from Canada, England and Utrecht this book illustrates the transforming effect of creatively applied thinking to social problems. The first part of the book considers how use of the self can be enhanced by analytic reflection and application to difficulties facing individuals and communities. The second part shows psychodynamic theory to be a valuable aid when thinking about issues faced by social workers facing threats and accusations, therapeutic work with children and restorative youth justice. The third part of the book considers the implications of working with the arts in community settings – an ex-mining community in North West England, the Tate Gallery in London and the 'cultural capital' of Liverpool. Taken as a whole these chapters combine to inspire and provoke thought of how the arts and the imagination can be used creativity to help service users confronted by problems with living and the workers who attempt to get alongside them to think about these.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work Practice.

Yasmin Gunaratnam

WHERE IS THE LOVE? ART, AESTHETICS AND RESEARCH

Almost three years ago, I was invited to speak at a multi-disciplinary conference on end of life care. The event coincided with my birthday and I had been ambivalent about the prospect of working that day. At the conference, I was confronted with a steady stream of Power-Point slides of statistics, charts and diagrams, many concerned with demonstrating the robustness and ‘evidence’ of different projects and initiatives. Undoubtedly nervous, but also defensive about my own forthcoming narrativecentred presentation, my mind started to wander. The sun was streaming through the high windows of the Victorian town hall, illuminating dust motes swimming in pools of light above the heads of participants. The room was warm and airless and I had begun thinking about whether I should adapt my presentation. In the midst of my distraction and seemingly from nowhere, the song ‘Where is the Love?’ from the hip-hop band Black Eyed Peas came into my mind. In the song, key social issues terrorism, war, racism, greed and intolerance — are lamented. The opening lyrics ask: ‘What’s wrong with the world, mama?/ People livin’ like they ain’t got no mamas …’. The chorus raises questions of integrity and forgiveness and appeals to a father figure: ‘People killin’, people dyin’ / children hurt and you hear them cryin’ / Can you practice what you preach/ and would you turn the other cheek/ Father, Father, Father help us/ send some guidance from above/ ‘cause people got me, got me questioning/ where is the love?’ The power and urgency of this simple plea is amplified in childlike repetition at the end of the chorus ‘Where is the love?/ Where is the love/ the love/ the love?’. At lunch time, after my presentation, I left the conference. I had a craving for Sri Lankan food and I went to eat in a local Sri Lankan restaurant by myself. The smells in the restaurant, the sounds and the tastes mingled with my birthday heightened feelings of loss for my own parents who had died a decade earlier and whose deaths had precipitated my research into palliative care. A year after this experience, ‘Where is the Love?’ became a frequently requested song on London radio stations, as Londoners struggled to make sense of the 7 July suicide bombings on the Underground. Soon afterwards, I began using the song in my teaching and training with health and social care professionals to discuss the suppression and the complexity of emotions in intercultural care.

I have begun with this personal account because it encapsulates the three main themes that this article engages with. First, I am interested in the inter-relationships and disjunctions between, on the one hand, forms of emotional thinking (Waddell, 1989) and ‘sensuous knowing’ (Taussig, 1993) that engage bodies, biography and emotion, and on the other, techno-rational forms of knowledge that deny incoherence and ambiguity and evade emotionality. These inter-relationships are critical in understanding the dynamics that can shape practice and creativity in welfare services. They also constitute a tension — perhaps even a paradox — that is embodied in this very act of trying to write about creative processes and the artistic.

Second, at a conceptual and a practical level, as a researcher working with questions of social difference in health and social care, I want to understand more about where artistic representations might come from and what art can offer us in our relationships to social difference and to otherness. My very practical concern is with what art does in public presentations. Why does art appear to touch and move audiences in ways that the written word and rationalist presentation doesn’t even come close to? For example, since I have been using art in research presentations, I have noticed that I receive far more feedback and also post-presentation requests for poems or for extracts from short stories than I do for the academic papers on which the presentations are based.

My third area of interest lies in reclaiming presentation as a vital, though often neglected, part of the research process. It is rarely accounted for financially, conceptually or emotionally — by researchers and funders. It can come to represent the validation of what is already known and the closure of the research process as discovery and invention. Yet, what I want to demonstrate is that research can become most alive in the field of presentation, carrying with it new understanding, ethical responsibilities and corporeal exposure.

Using experiential examples and drawing upon ideas from psychoanalytic aesthetics and post-structuralist theory, I will explore the form and content of my artistic representations as encounters and events that can ‘make way’ (Caputo, 1997) for what is beyond immediate recognition and realist representation. In many ways, the structure of the article itself mimics the pull, tug and unevenness of the combining of art with social theory, involving a sliding between personal experience, academic and artistic literature and analysis.

Creativity, care and social welfare

It is difficult to discuss the place and the value of creativity within the context of social welfare without also recognising how the proliferation of market and consumerist principles (Froggett, 2002) and the sheer intensity of caring work with inadequate resources (Waddell, 1989; Jones et al., 2006) can suffocate and marginalise the spaces that enable creativity and the aesthetic. Drawing attention to the value of creativity and art within such organisational contexts can seem both trivial and grandiose far removed from the realities and constraints of ‘real world’ practice. It can feel especially inappropriate and/or insensitive to talk about art, when so much of work across the welfare services is concerned with human pain, frailty and suffering. As Waddell (1989) has recognised with specific regard to social work, there are incessant attacks upon emotional thinking in social work that is characterised by an inherent paradox involving:

… the necessity of thinking in order to modulate pain, and the difficulty of doing so because pain is so hard to bear, and the forces against thinking so recalcitrant and becoming ever more so.

(Waddell, 1989, p. 32)

Such relations are also present in the palliative care field where much of my research has been conducted and which involves work with people with life-limiting illnesses and those who are dying. An environment of care marked by repeated losses and grief, where trauma can be unspeakable and where bodies hurt, decompose, unravel and fade. In addition to the complex physical, emotional and socio-economic needs of patients and carers (Croft, 2004), palliative care professionals face very real constraints of time in their work with dying people. As one hospice social worker described the ‘pressures’ on her practice: ‘it’s now or never, basically’ (Gunaratnam, 1997, p. 172).

Yet somewhat paradoxically, in a field of care that is socially and symbolically marginalised (Lawton, 2000) and that is emotion-rich and time-scarce, emotional thinking and creativity can be a vital part of professional practice, not only through structured activities such as art or music therapy (see Connell, 1998; Schroeder-Sheker, 1994), but also through the enfolding of the artistic into everyday practices: the researcher who ‘as a last resort’ spontaneously tells an agitated patient a story that comforts and calms her (Stanworth, 2003, pp. 11–12); the psychologist who plays Shubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ sung by Jesse Norman for a patient during a painful medical procedure (De Hennezel, 1997, p. 6); the Japanese doctor who writes personalised, traditional Japanese poems (tanka) for his patients (Tamba, 2006); the social worker who after years of trying ‘very hard’ to acquire expertise in different areas of her work, relaxes her desire for structure and certainty, recognising: ‘I am now comfortable to work with mystery, to wait for the unspoken to emerge, to work with image and metaphor’ (Mason, 2002, pp. 26–27).

The divisions between care and art and between rationality and sensuality in these examples are blurred, but they also evoke a sense of extra-ordinary impulsiveness and improvisation that appears outside of structure and forethought, yet is fully situated in the context of palliative care. Qualities that are not dissimilar to my experiences of using art in research. In focussing specifically upon my presentation of research findings through art — photography, music, poetry, literature — I want to examine how artistic representation can create opportunities for evoking and affirming some of the poetics of human experience, that is: the non-measurable; the contradictory; that which exceeds identity categories (Adorno, 1984); the ‘indescribable and the undiscussible’ (Bar-on, 1999); and the hopefulness of a ‘not yet’ (Bloch, 1986).

Taking root: creativity and presentation

… poems happen. They spring up like weeds, growing through cement cracks, under the most inhospitable of conditions, like leaves trapped in a fence or wall, like fungi growing in crevices.

(Caputo, 1993, p. 183)

FIGURE 1 A tree growing through an abandoned house in the East End of London

My use of art in research presentations has emerged over the past four years and was significantly enabled by a move outside of academia and into the black voluntary sector. Although my research focus has remained broadly the same, within the voluntary sector I was presenting research to more socially differentiated and non-specialist audiences. There is no doubt that I felt challenged in these new environments to find more accessible ways of communicating research and without compromising complexity. However, I do not wish to give the impression that these changes in style were wholly rational or controlled. While I prepare materials for presentations, what actually happens during a presentation, both what I say/show and how this is received/responded to is unpredictable. In this regard, I see the experience of presenting in similar terms to Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of ‘practice’: as involving a sensual, moment-by-moment unfolding of activity that is characterised by presence, context and improvisation. What is especially risky and jeopardising about the practice of public presentation is the role of judgement in linear time, that as Arendt (1978) has pointed out is both unpredictable and irreversible.

In preparing research presentations, I often find that my thoughts and judgement about what to include in a presentation are hijacked by a bubbling up of images, music, and words or phrases, evoked and literal, from interviews and research interactions. External and apparently unrelated events can have a similar effect and can root themselves in my analysis of individual cases or topics. I feel called, or more often whispered to and pestered, to take account of wispy and unformulated connections. I can find myself drawn to certain images or to photograph something (such as the tree growing out of the house in figure 1¹ that materialises the Caputo quotation so beautifully) and not know why.

It is only at a later stage of assembling a presentation that these seemingly haphazard fragments of thought and image can come together and make sense. At other times the impulse for artistic representation springs from a profound irritation at the inadequacy of my analysis, use of language or attempts to represent a fullness of lives. I have a strong sense that I have missed or forgotten something. It is not uncommon for the missing fragment to come to me in my sleep, so that in the morning before a presentation I am scrambling through books or poetry, my own writing or photographs to incorporate the missing item. Sometimes the mosaic of these different representational forms can ‘work’, to the extent that I feel that I am closer to what I had in mind (and heart). At other times the sense of an absent presence continues to haunt a presentation.

What can connect these very different experiences is the delay and distance between an event (such as an interview) and how artistic representations emerge or pull me towards them. Using Arendt’s (1978) work on imagination to discuss reflective thinking and practice in social welfare, Lynn Froggett (2002) has suggested that it is precisely the withdrawal of the intellect and the holding of ambivalence that can free creativity:

… all thinking involves a retraction of the mind from commonsense awareness of the immediacy of the given world and is in some sense reflective in that the mind becomes the ‘screen’ or ‘container’ where images and imageless thoughts are formed and refashioned … Perhaps what we are referring to when we speak of reflective thinking and practice is the ability to delay the return of thought to the outer world long enough to turn things around, experiment with perspective, infuse with emotion, manipulate, modify or enjoy them. This involves a tolerance of ambiguity.

(Froggett, 2002, p. 179)

As Froggett suggests, creativity and ‘experimentation with perspective’ require a holding off of interpretation and judgement, and a pacing, backwards and forwards, between outer and inner worlds. For me, such movements are also intrinsically ethical and corporeal. They involve an emotional and sensual vulnerability, an openness to be touched by demands from the outside world and a surrendering of intellect, enabling what the poet John Keats (1958, p. 193) termed ‘negative capability’ — a capacity ‘of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Relations expressed with great insight and power in the eighteenth century poem ‘The Tables Turned’ by William Wordsworth (1798):

Sweet is the lore which nature brings.

Our meddling intellect

Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:

We murder to dissect.

Enough of science and of art;

Close up these barren leaves.

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

Art as an event: accounting for creativity

What makes me think? Something gets under my sk...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 - Use of the self in creative expression
• Part 2 - Theoretical underpinnings
• Part 3 - The wider community
• Index