Art-Based Research Community (ARC) webinar series

Session 1. Care Aesthetics. The Art of Perception

Speakers: Tom Maassen & Nieke Koek

Date: Thursday January 8th 2026

Time: 15:00-17:00u.

Online (Zoom)

‍

What happens when we understand care not only as an act, but as a way of perceiving the world?‍

The first session of this sequence will be hosted by artist Nieke Koek and philosopher Tom Maassen. During this one-hour session, Nieke and Tom will - together with the participants - explore how specific artful practices, that explicitly address dimensions of perception and embodiment, can be meaningful within contexts of care. We will start with a small exercise in which specific concepts that, according to both Nieke and Tom, are central from a care aesthetic point of view, are attentively listened to. Next, in two breakout rooms, Nieke and Tom will discuss these concepts in their practical as well as theoretical meanings. After 15 minutes Nieke and Tom switch groups. Finally, in the remaining time, we will reflect on consequences and possibilities for research and practice.

This session examines care aesthetics as a responsive practice: how we perceive and respond in healthcare settings. Through dialogue and artistic reflection, we’ll explore how aesthetic sensibilities shape our responses to vulnerability, dependency, and pain. Participants are invited to consider how cultivating full-bodied perception can transform both clinical practice and research relationships.

This session explores participatory, arts-based research as an aesthetic practice with ethical consequences. We will look at how co-creation can redistribute voice and agency; foreground lived experience and make room for ambiguity and friction.

‍

‍

Are you interested in participating? Register via the button below. You will receive a message with the link to the webinar in the first week of January.

‍
This webinar is part of a series on art-based research in healthcare. In the Netherlands, we are seeing more and more artists, artistic researchers, clinicians, and scientists exploring the potential of art-based research in healthcare. Yet many of us work in isolation and struggle with similar questions about methods, ethics, collaboration, and dissemination. We warmly invite you to join this growing community of practice dedicated to deepening and expanding the field of art-based research in healthcare.

‍

The speakers

Nieke Koek (1982, NL) is an interdisciplinary artist working with the body as an artistic and epistemic instrument. For over fifteen years, she has developed, implemented, and critically reflected on art-based practices embedded within medical, care, and research environments. Her work positions artistic practice as a method for knowledge production, with embodied experience as its primary source.

At the core of Koek’s practice lies the conviction that art in healthcare is not a form of distraction or decoration, but a rigorous investigative tool. Through artistic processes, she creates space for patients, healthcare professionals, and researchers to explore lived bodily experience in depth. Her methods focus on human-to-human connection and transformation, prioritizing embodied experience over predefined goals or outcomes. These processes contribute to improved communication, deeper understanding, and positive health-related outcomes, while also generating insights relevant to medical decision-making.

Since 2018, Koek has worked predominantly in close collaboration with hospitals, universities, and research institutes, engaging in long-term co-creative projects with doctors, scientists, patients, and caregivers. Her work addresses complex themes such as pain, illness, death, recovery, rehabilitation, and vulnerability. She has extensive experience working in contexts including oncology, chronic pain, neurological injury, eating disorders, rehabilitation medicine, and care for people with multiple disabilities.

Koek contributes to academic research through reflective writing, documentation, and artistic inquiry, collaborating with institutions such as the Utrecht University of the Arts (HKU), the Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing, and Hanze University of Applied Sciences. Alongside her research practice, she teaches across art academies, universities, and professional training programs and regularly participates as an expert in national and international panels on body-oriented care, art and health, social design, and art-based research.

Her work has been presented in both artistic and medical contexts, including Amsterdam UMC, Museum De Fundatie (solo), Pulchri Studio, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and Centre Pompidou Brussels. In parallel to her artistic practice, she is a certified body-oriented trauma therapist, informing her careful and ethically grounded approach.

‍

Tom Maassen (1977, NL) has been a senior researcher at the Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing since 2022. In his research, Tom is interested in the role of the body of the care professional in healthcare and healthcare education. He believes that the body is a blind spot in education and practice.

In collaboration with various artists (theater, dance, voice, visual arts), he develops ways to address the body, perception, and imagination of healthcare professionals in educational settings. Sensitivity to "forms of care" is what summarizes his notion of  an aesthetics of care, which is a theoretical framework that Tom further develops through his research. He collaborates closely with James Thompson of the University of Manchester. Together with Tineke Abma, Tom is the program leader of Care, Aesthetics & Art.

Tom studied philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and in Jena, Germany. After graduating, he worked as a lecturer-researcher at the Metamedica department of Maastricht University from 2010 onwards, teaching health law and medical ethics. From 2016 onwards, he worked at The Hague University of Applied Sciences in the Nursing program. Together with Andries Hiskes, he wrote and taught the elective course "The Art of Caring," in which students from healthcare programs collaborated with students from art academies. At the time, Tom was a researcher in Jacco van Uden's Change Management professorship. The origins of his notion of "care aesthetics" dates back to that period.

Tom has a great passion for woodworking. He has always wanted to share the love and care that comes with it with healthcare students. Part of his PhD research focuses on woodworking as a form of care. Another theme in his research is the relation between ethics and aesthetics in care education. Tom, along with colleagues, organizes the annual Arts & Health festival at Leyden Academy. Since last year, along with several colleagues from the LUMC, Tom launched an Honors Class for students in Medicine and other studies, called Care and the art of perception.

‍