Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-Inquiry, and Healing

289 Pages·2022·12.87 MB·English

by  Barbara A. Bickel, R. Michael Fisher

“How lovely and inspiring to read this remarkable work of art/artistry, creativity,
community and consciousness of connecting and interconnectivity. This work
offers an aesthetic/creative, emancipatory caring pathway for human healing
during and after a pandemic crisis. This book invites and evokes fresh new
insights, where wisdom is discovered and co-created from within and among
circles of caring.”
Jean Watson, PhD, RN, AHN-BC, FAAN, LL (AAN), Founder Watson
Caring Science Institute, Distinguished Prof/Dean Emerita
University of Colorado Denver, College of Nursing
“This engaging book both describes and performs a group’s artistic journey during
the challenging times of COVID. Experiential, communal, playful, and moving,
the book points at possibilities and opportunities for aesthetic explorations and
artistry within a special space. Co-inquiry through Spontaneous Creation-Making
offers everyone a compelling journey of art-making, aesthetic explorations, along
with ideas for facilitation and communal care serving the future.”
Liora Bresler, PhD Professor Emerita, University of Illinois, College of
Education & School of Art and Design, Urbana-Champaign
“Bickel and Fisher present us with a guidebook for connection and healing
through the practice of spontaneous art-making, a practice they themselves
have been involved with for many years. This is a hopeful book based on their
experiences—art not as escape but as engagement both with ourselves and those
around us. Caring, compassion, community: these are the roads the world always
needs more of, and this book offers a unique way of starting the journey.”
Eva Tihanyi, author of The Largeness of Rescue, Flying Underwater:
Poems New and Selected, and Truth and Other Fictions.
“I am very impressed by Barbara Bickel and Michael Fisher’s articulation of the
art process, community, and especially their collaborative spirit! They are both so
very inspiring! Their book feeds the soul with artistic methods and prompts that
reawaken the senses through play and observation.”
Dr. Katrina Plato, registered art therapist and educator
“This book weaves together theories, practices, images, text-based forms, and
30 years of work to offer insights into creative communal practices that co-authors
Bickel and Fisher call Spontaneous Creation-Making (SCM). Through this
compelling and timely guidebook we are invited to enter sacred, mysterious and
playful borderspaces that lead us to deeper understandings and more nuanced
explorations of art-care methods but also, for example, of community, creativity,
healing/wholism, (un)learning, and inquiry. This is an important resource for
anyone who is interested in engaging with and/or facilitating spontaneous
creation-making processes, even in virtual contexts. This book is a gift!”
Kathy Mantas, PhD. Professor, Schulich School of Education, Nipissing
University, Ontario, Canada
ART-CARE PRACTICES FOR
RESTORING THE COMMUNAL
This book contributes to a larger global call to radically re-create ourselves—to transform
our fear and alienation from art, Nature, and ourselves. It nurtures a magical, mythical,
integral reenchantment of art in relationship with all others—human and more-than-human.
With compassion and grace, the co-authors outline how all people, in small circles of
community, may access the gift of Spontaneous Creation-Making and change dominant
narratives of individualism through a restoration of the communal. Re-discovering
interconnectivity through art-care we can dream courageously together into the unknown
possibilities of a precarious future.
Art-care, as coined by the co-authors, is a matrixial form of communicaring through
art and reverence. Based on the co-authors’ many years of engagement with communal
creative practices, teaching, activism, and a COVID-19-initiated Restorative Lab Project
through Studio M*, this book demonstrates practices supported and enlarged by art,
creativity research, relational healing, and process theories. The book draws upon matrixial,
maternal, precolonial, and decolonizing worldviews. Uniquely, it provides a practical way
to creatively enter the beauty and complexity of artist-theorist-activist Bracha L. Ettinger’s
Matrixial theory. In sharing practices rooted in ritual, the body and emplacement, the
book offers possibilities for expanding and transforming imaginaries, time perceptions,
movements, healing, social action, and beauty.
Art-care is available to everyone and not limited to artists. Shared creative practices
call forth open-inquiry, fragility, awe, and compassion by experimenting with what the
co-authors name matrixial aesthetic practices and matrixial mediators. This theoretically informed
and practice-based book bridges the individual with the communal in Creation-centred
ways that interweave the many parts with the whole. It provides examples of teachings,
practices and spontaneous creations of 22 makers that will benefit those who want to
integrate art-care into individual practices or group facilitation. This book was created
to benefit socially engaged artists, arts-based researchers, artist-philosophers, activists,
students, teachers, organizers, therapists, caregivers, and more.
AUTHORS
Barbara A. Bickel and R. Michael Fisher have been co-creative life-partners since
1990. They combine their skills as artists, researchers, teachers, mentors, and
speakers to facilitate healing for human recovery and liberation with respect for
the Earth and all sentient beings. Their first communal project was co-founding
the In Search of Fearlessness (ISOF) Centre and community, which birthed The
Centre Gallery and the ISOF Research Institute, which they directed, respectively,
in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, from 1991 to 1999. They obtained arts-based
research doctorates in Education at the University of British Columbia, Barbara
in art education and Michael in curriculum and instruction between 1999 and
2008. From 2008 to 2017, Barbara taught in the School of Fine Arts at Southern
Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale, United States, and they co-founded the
Center for Spiritual Inquiry and Integral Education where Michael served as director.
Upon retirement from SIU, in 2017, they returned to Canada and co-founded
Studio M*: A Research Creation Lab Intersecting Arts, Culture and Healing in Calgary.
Studio M* moved with them to Nanaimo, British Columbia on Vancouver Island
in 2021 where they now create and live.
Combined, they have written or edited more than a dozen books and over
a hundred journal articles. They co-founded In Search of Fearlessness (ISOF)
Research Institute, a Canadian publishing house in 1992, which to date has pub-
lished six books and numerous monographs. Barbara is author of Art, Ritual and
Trance Inquiry: Arational Learning in an Irrational World (Palgrave Macmillan) and
co-editor of Arts-Based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching (Rout-
ledge). Michael’s recent books include The Fearless Engagement of Four Arrows,
The Marianne Williamson Presidential Phenomenon, and Resistances to Fearlessness. In
addition, they have founded two open access journals, respectively: Artizein: Arts
and Teaching Journal and the International Journal of Fear Studies. They engage edit-
ing as a service of compassionate curating.
Authors v
They have collaborated as both visual and performance artists, while each has
had independent professional multimedia-visual-performance art careers, exhib-
iting and performing widely. They engage art as social practice and are honoured
to serve as mentors to artists, writers, scholars, teachers, and caregivers. Learn
more about their art, research, and teaching at Studio M* www.studiom.space,
Barbara’s art site www.barbarabickel.ca, her artist collective archive www.gestar-
eartcollective.com, and Michael’s YouTube channel R. Michael Fisher (www.
youtube.com/channel/UC01OHEXhSuxnyilmkV0f95A).

ART-CARE PRACTICES
FOR RESTORING THE
COMMUNAL
Education, Co-Inquiry, and Healing
Barbara A. Bickel and R. Michael Fisher
Cover image: Bracha L. Ettinger, Eurydice n.58.2019–2022. Oil on
Canvas, 30x30.  BLE. Courtesy of the artist.
Ⓒ
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Barbara A. Bickel and R. Michael Fisher
The right of Barbara A. Bickel and R. Michael Fisher to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bickel, Barbara, author. | Fisher, R. Michael, author.
Title: Art-care practices for restoring the communal : education, co-inquiry
and healing / Barbara A. Bickel, R. Michael Fisher.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022031316 (print) | LCCN 2022031317 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032109961 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032109947 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003218005 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Artists and community. | Art—Psychology.
Classification: LCC N72.A76 B53 2023 (print) | LCC N72.A76
(ebook) | DDC 700.1/9—dc23/eng/20220926
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022031316
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022031317
ISBN: 978-1-032-10996-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-10994-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-21800-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003218005
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
We dedicate this book to the artworkings of ancestral and future
motherers of the kinship way of Life.