ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins by situating art therapy in palliative care within Australian allied health. She describes a novel, interdisciplinary art-based approach to inquiry that involves looking, listening and feeling her way back into two of the conversations, to think with, rather than alongside, art-making, writing and place. The author examines her original research by generating further, and qualitatively different, insights by working with Erin Manning’s and Brian Massumi’s process-focused method of ‘thinking in the act’. She deals with a discussion of the ways in which distributing the agency between researcher, storytellers, art, writing and the environment of practice or research contributes to practice knowledge, and what the process allows her to think about. Australia is a vast urban, rural and often remote landscape and almost a quarter of the population live in isolated communities, suggesting limited access to institutional or multi-disciplinary palliative care.
