ABSTRACT
This chapter examines reciprocity of care and creativity between people labelled with PMLD (profound and multiple learning disabilities) and an interdisciplinary team of artists within a longstanding programme of movement and live music improvisation.
Guided by the concept of in-between aesthetics, this inquiry explores how sensory improvisation enables the relational space, dissolving aesthetic hierarchies between art, care, and access. Through care aesthetics, it identifies often invisible and tacit exchanges that unfold between us. This reflection is anchored by two contrasting moments within Ambient Jam where reciprocal care manifests in unexpected ways: through undoing doing, and spirited wildness.
The polyvocal text weaves together the voices of carers, artists, disabled artists, and family members, reflecting a communal embodied inquiry within a society that values words over sensory ways of knowing. It grapples with the fact that rich, sensory ways of communicating shared by people labelled with PMLD are translated here into a form they cannot access. To retrieve information lost in translation, photos and abstract paintings by disabled artist Hannah James are threaded throughout, offering another way to convey experience.
