Project
Becomings
engage · learn · reimagine · grow
Reimagining recovery narratives following adversity
Creative And Arts-Based Inquiry
Exploring trauma and recovery through and beyond words.
What Is Creative And Arts-Based Inquiry?
Creative and arts-based inquiry uses creative practices as part of the process of exploring and producing knowledge. Rather than relying only on interviews, questionnaires or written accounts, research can involve practices such as making, drawing, working with materials, photography, animation or other forms of creative expression.
Importantly, creativity does not simply provide a different way for someone to communicate something they already know. The process of making can itself become a way of thinking, feeling, noticing and coming to know. An idea might emerge through working with a material, an unexpected image might prompt a new question, or someone may encounter an experience differently through making than they could through talking about it.
This means the finished artwork is not necessarily the most important part. Attention can also be given to what happens while something is being made — encounters with materials, bodily sensations, emotions, memories, conversations, resistance, uncertainty and unexpected changes in direction.
In this sense, creative inquiry can create possibilities for knowledge to emerge through and beyond words, while recognising that words, images, bodies, materials and experiences can also work together rather than needing to be treated as separate ways of knowing.
Why Creative Inquiry For Trauma and Recovery Research?
Trauma and recovery can be difficult to capture through words alone. Experiences may be felt through the body, connected to sensations, memories, relationships and environments, or simply be difficult to explain in a clear or ordered way.
Creative inquiry offered different ways of approaching these experiences. Rather than requiring co-researchers to begin by explaining what recovery meant to them, making could provide somewhere to start — through an image, material, movement, object, colour or creative process. Words could still be important, but they did not have to carry the whole experience.
This was particularly relevant to Project Becomings because the research questioned approaches to recovery that privilege cognitive, verbal and individualised ways of knowing. Creative practices created opportunities to attend to embodied, affective, relational and material experiences that might otherwise be difficult to notice or communicate.
Importantly, this was not simply about making difficult experiences easier to express. Sometimes people did not already know what they wanted to express.
Something could emerge through making: a material might feel unexpectedly significant, an image might develop differently from what was intended, or the process of creating something might bring a previously unrecognised feeling or understanding into awareness.
Creative inquiry therefore allowed not-knowing to have a place within the research. Co-researchers did not always need to arrive with an answer about what recovery was or what an experience meant. Making could become part of the process through which questions, connections and understandings began to emerge.
For Project Becomings, creativity was therefore not simply a more engaging way of collecting data. It became part of how recovery could be encountered, questioned and come to be known differently.
Creative Inquiry In Project Becomings
Creative inquiry was woven throughout Project Becomings rather than introduced as a single research activity. Across the project, co-researchers encountered different opportunities to make, experiment, respond and reflect using creative practices and materials.
The creative process was deliberately open and emergent. Co-researchers were not asked to produce a particular kind of artwork or demonstrate artistic skill. Activities provided a starting point, but what was made, how materials were used and what became significant could develop differently for each person.
Creative work also became part of how the research itself developed. For example, body mapping initially opened up different ways of exploring experiences of recovery. The maps were then considered collectively, with emerging ideas helping to shape what the group explored in later workshops. The absence of the inner child from many of the body maps, despite its importance in discussion, became something the group noticed and chose to explore further through later creative work.
Making was not confined to the workshops either. Co-researchers could continue creating and reflecting between sessions, and some creative works developed or acquired different meanings over time. This meant that creativity was not simply a technique used at a particular moment to generate ‘data’; creative practice became part of the ongoing movement of the research.
Eventually, creative works also moved beyond the research group and into Project Becomings as a public exhibition. This created another encounter: artworks and experiences that had emerged through the research could affect, provoke and invite responses from people who had not participated in the original research.
Creative inquiry therefore operated across making, reflection, collective exploration and public engagement — participating not only in how experiences were expressed, but in how the research itself came to develop.
Making As A Way Of Knowing
Within Project Becomings, making was not understood simply as a way of illustrating something that was already known. The act of making could itself participate in how something came to be known.
We often imagine a creative process as beginning with an idea: someone knows what they want to communicate and then chooses an image, object or material to represent it. But creative practice does not always happen this way. Hands move, materials respond, things resist, mistakes happen and unexpected forms emerge. What someone comes to understand through that process may be different from what they thought they were going to make at the beginning.
This became visible across Project Becomings. Working with materials could bring attention to bodily sensations, feelings or memories; making and remaking could shift an emerging idea; and encountering a creative work again later could produce a different understanding from when it was first created. The relationship between knowing and doing was therefore not necessarily one-directional — doing could also produce new possibilities for knowing.
This was particularly important when co-researchers encountered experiences they could feel or recognise but could not yet easily explain. Rather than treating this as a lack of knowledge that needed to be overcome, creative inquiry allowed space to stay with uncertainty and non-knowing. Something did not have to be fully understood before it could be explored.
The materials themselves mattered too. Clay has weight and resistance; thread can knot, stretch and connect; paint moves across a surface. These qualities can affect what happens during making. The researcher, co-researcher and material are not simply separate parts of the process: what becomes possible can emerge through their encounter.
Making could therefore be both a way of expressing knowledge and an event through which knowledge changed, emerged or became possible in the first place.
What Did Creative Inquiry Make Possible?
Creative inquiry made it possible to encounter aspects of trauma and recovery that may have remained difficult to access through conversation alone. It created space for experiences to be approached through bodies, materials, images, movement and making, alongside words rather than necessarily replacing them.
This sometimes enabled experiences to emerge before they could be clearly explained. A feeling might become noticeable through the process of making; an unexpected material response could interrupt an existing understanding; or something created at one moment could take on a different significance when encountered again later.
Creativity also allowed recovery to remain multiple and unfinished. Co-researchers did not have to produce a coherent story of recovery or arrive at a final interpretation of what something meant. Creative works could hold contradiction, uncertainty and change — qualities that became important in questioning more linear understandings of what recovery should look like.
Importantly, creative inquiry did not automatically make difficult experiences easier, more accessible or less distressing. Materials and creative processes could also evoke unexpected sensations, memories and emotions. Choice, flexibility and responsiveness therefore remained important, particularly when working with experiences of trauma.
Across Project Becomings, creative inquiry contributed to a broader shift in how knowledge itself was approached. Experiential, embodied, relational and material ways of knowing could sit alongside cognitive and verbal knowledge, rather than being treated as secondary to it.
What became possible was therefore not simply another way of representing recovery, but different possibilities for encountering, questioning and coming to know it.
