On Thursday, 8 January 2026, the first webinar of the Art-Based Research Community (ARC) took place. The aim of this series is to bring together artists, artistic researchers, clinicians, and scientists engaged in art-based research in healthcare, to go deeper, and to explore the potential of the arts in healthcare.

In the first webinar, artist Nieke Koek and philosopher Tom Maassen guided us into the world of care aesthetics. Care aesthetics focuses on the experience of care, placing emotional, embodied, and aesthetic dimensions at the center. Aesthetic experiences, such as atmosphere, interior design, and the interactions between healthcare professionals and patients, affect the wellbeing of both the care recipient and the care provider. It is about creating a holistic care experience: about perception and responsiveness.

That last point, responsiveness, was central to the webinar: how do we perceive, and how do we respond in care environments? This was explored in a workshop in which the speakers, in two groups, each discussed a single word. Maassen used a conversational method called “kapittelen”: in the conversation, participants remain silent for as long as they speak. This encouraged contemplation and reflection rather than reaction.

His word was “indeterminacy,” which can be translated into Dutch as onbestembaarheid, onbepaaldheid, or besluiteloosheid: a state of not knowing, and not doing. An in-between space, as one participant described it. I noticed discomfort in myself. I am a goal-oriented, results-driven person. I like organising, control, knowing how to get from A to B, knowing what B is, and where it is.

It was interesting, in the contemplative silence, to notice what a single word did to me. Meanwhile, participants reflected on the word. The conversation, silence equal to speech, wandered (via a turtle) toward the question of how we might slow down in today’s healthcare. The conversation ended that way too: indeterminate, undefined, and undecided.

“A space where everything is possible, both possibilities and uncertainty.” (Participant)

We were still in that in-between space when Nieke Koek took over from Maassen. Koek began her word exploration with a mindfulness exercise focused on your heartbeat and its rhythm, allowing participants to reflect more in the body, more embodied, on Koek’s word: “motive” (NL: motief), meaning both a pattern and that which moves you to action.

This immediately made me think of the music of The Lord of the Rings: different characters and regions all have their own motif, which changes along with the story, shaped, for example, by emotions, so the motifs continuously shift, while remaining recognisable at their core. Using this concept, Koek explained her practice, for instance, how she works with people with chronic pain to give form to pain. She tries to bring the person’s motif to the surface, and to change it, so that pain no longer dominates, no longer becomes the dominant motif, and space emerges for another sound.

“Motif: that which sets something in motion, changes, develops, repeats (…), a small movement that asks to be felt.” (Nieke Koek)

After the workshop section ended, there was a debrief in break-out rooms and a plenary reflection. What emerged was a felt urgency for researchers, artists, and clinicians to come together, not only to exchange experiences, but also to support one another and to collectively shape the field of art-based research in healthcare.

What kind of future do we want to create? How can we involve everyone? Questions that currently have no answers. For now, we are still in the in-between space.

Further reading?

Maguire-Rosier, K., Polonyi, R., & Thompson, J. (Eds.). (2025). Care aesthetics and the arts. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Preview? The chapter by Tom Maassen and Marjolijn Baars titled Inspired Caring. Care aesthetic lessons from an artist’s residency in a Dutch academic research institute can be read here.

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