ABSTRACT
Welcome to Care Aesthetics and the Arts. We hope you enjoy the chapters in the pages that follow and that they provoke new thinking about the arts practices documented. We also hope this book compliments the range of practical and scholarly interests that there have been in the relationship between art making and care taking that have appeared in the first years of the 2020s. We believe that the variety of writers, projects featured, and perspectives taken here provides a compelling addition to this broader field of research. While we acknowledge the breadth of this current work, this Introduction aims to outline the distinct approach behind care aesthetics and explain how this book fits into the wider context of the series of which it is a part. Care Aesthetics and the Arts is the second title in the Routledge Studies in Care Aesthetics series. In future editions, care aesthetics will be brought into dialogue with non-arts domains – the next edition, for example, will focus on care aesthetics and dementia studies. It is important, therefore, to lay out how care aesthetics connects to artistic practices but emphasise that it is not automatically one that belongs exclusively to them. To do this, we illustrate the relations between the arts, aesthetics, health and care and how these inform the distinctions we seek to make between care aesthetics and other frameworks such as ‘arts in health’. We start this commentary through an account of an event on Creative Health that took place in Manchester, UK in 2024 and then connect this to a research project on the aesthetics of care, which involved the three editors here. Our aim is to show some of the emphases that a care aesthetic approach brings, before outlining what it means for this edition, in particular.
