Most of the participants have drifted away and the art materials are spread on the floor. M carefully scoops green sand into a bowl and, with a delighted smile, tips it over her head, watching the grains cascade down the edge of the bowl and onto her chest before brushing them off and repeating the ritual. Beside her, P skilfully balances a child on her knee and supervises children moving through the bathroom. M looks through the transparent bowl at P and smiles. P grabs a handful of sand sprinkling it onto the top of the bowl, they watch the sand run down the outside of the bowl and laugh together. I notice the rhythm of their actions and the graceful way P joins the moment without disrupting its flow, embodying a seamless interplay of teaching and creativity. We notice and reflexively discuss my observation of the artworking. P is surprised by how much I notice, I am surprised by how creative and responsive P’s teaching skills are, we are both delighted by the power of M’s play. I realise the depth and complexity of these intra-actions, the validation and extension of play rituals, the connections and empathy being displayed. This simultaneous experience of being, becoming, and belonging is a privilege to witness in the richness of this shared TAP space. This witnessing provides an opportunity to develop a practice of deeper noticing, and critical and mindful reflection. 

Technical terms used above were developed within the framework of TAP. These are defined in the following section that describes the research study underpinning the TAP program.

‘Process art’ refers to open-ended art experiences focused on exploring, experimenting, and making art as playing rather than producing an artefact or specific outcome (Jarvis, 2011). Experiencing and making art has been shown to allow for the exploration of personal and cultural identity, the development of emotional resilience and meaningful connections with the natural world.

When making art is seen not only as the creation of artefacts via the exercise of technical skills, but also as a relational, experiential process, its transformative effect becomes clear. Meyerowitz-Katz and Reddick (2017) for instance, emphasised that making art should be valued as a process in itself, fostering intrinsic motivation and a distinctive space for growth. In this light, process art is seen to be deeply relational, existing within the unique cultural, social, and physical contexts of classrooms (Fraser et al., 2006). Through engaging artfully with materials together, children can establish unique connections with their environment and their peers, developing a sense of belonging (Cahill, 2015; Franck et al., 2020).

The concept of ‘liveliness’ is central to process art in TAP, illustrating the dynamic state of early learning and educational spaces. MacAlpine (2021) has described liveliness as a quality of interactive change that brings together time, people, materials, and the environment in a continuously evolving, engaging, and interactive process. Within this lively engagement, children develop foundational play schemas, or repeated patterns of play, that help structure knowledge and understanding (Piaget, 1953). By means of attention and attunement to these schemas, educators and art therapists can witness how expertise, capacity, and knowledge are built, moving beyond static or individualised views of learning or well-being (Armstrong & Ross, 2020).

Process art operates through a creative state of ‘flow’, whereby participants become increasingly absorbed in the process. Csikszentmihalyi (1997) has described this flow as a state of optimal engagement driven by intrinsic motivation. This allows for, and gives structure to, exploration, expression, independent learning, and problem-solving (Arnott & Duncan, 2019).

Much of the time, a process art event is transient; the process, sensory experience, and expertise developed within the event can be understood as the outcome or ‘artwork’. If there is an artefact at the end of a lively process art event, it may represent an embodiment of the learning, well-being, and capacity of the artists; it may also, however, be understood as a container, a souvenir, or a symbol of the artist’s sense of being, belonging, and becoming (Proulx, 2002). Much research, as shown in a systematic literature review by Barblett et al. (2021), conducted to inform Australia’s updated Early Years Learning Framework, indicated that children’s creative potential is frequently overlooked and undervalued in early education. This review highlights that children’s abilities to express themselves and actively participate within their environments are often not given sufficient attention or respect. Recognition and encouragement of the capacities of young children, across the curriculum areas but perhaps distinctly in artistic production, are central to their development as individuals. By fostering autonomy, connection, and creativity, process art enables children to explore who they, distinctively, are. Perhaps most vividly, process art facilitated by an educator and art therapist can provide children with supportive, dynamic environments, nurturing their growth in all its complexity.

The TAP program

The Therapeutic Art Play (TAP) program has been running in educational settings since 2019. Created and implemented by an educator who is both artist and art therapist, TAP fosters unique environments for nurturing agency, creativity and reflection. Central to the TAP approach is an understanding that security and care are foundational for meaningful engagement in play, learning, and well-being. It is this foundation of care, consistently highlighted in early childhood frameworks, such as the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), that prioritises well-being (Department of Education (Australia), 2022; Meyerowitz-Katz & Reddick, 2017). TAP responds to and extends this notion providing a program informed by visual arts, pedagogy, and therapeutic practices. Art therapy encourages the processing and communication of experience, ideas, and emotions in ways beyond verbal expression or written text (Malchiodi, 2020; Waller, 2006). TAP, originally developed in early learning environments, has installations in primary schools, out-of-hours school groups, private clients, and with practice-informing pre-service teaching workshops. A rigorous exploration of the TAP program via research study has afforded a deeper understanding of its core principles, critical practices, and potential impacts.

Exponential growth through research

The TAP program was explained, explored, and exemplified in an arts-based research project completed in 2023. Data were gathered from therapeutic art play conducted in a toddler room with children aged one to three and their accompanying adults. The morning programs were facilitated on Wangal land (in Sydney’s inner-west). These involved interactions with sand, flowers, shells, and stones. The shells and stones were gathered from and, where possible, returned to Dharawal Country along the coast of southern New South Wales. Included also were plaster, matt board, scoops, containers, and water. Data took the form of photographs of artworking and artworks, naturalistic observations, questionnaires, and recordings. In addition, the researcher/TAP facilitator gathered data from their own artworking in response to the research process. Taking part in lively creative process art allowed for the consideration of human and non-human interactions (Taylor, 2017). An analytic framework based on aspects of theories of new materialism enabled a diffractive analysis, as outlined below, that puts on display the characteristics and impacts of the TAP program.

Methodology: Diffractive analysis

The study adopted a new materialist methodology, recognising that well-being and learning are created and develop through entangled relationships between people, materials, and environments through time. Moving from reflective to diffractive analysis (Barad, 2007), the research informing this article attended to an exploration of shifting intra-action in the TAP artworking space. Key concepts such as intra-action, active agents, artworking, nomadic artworking, and relational practices like deep noticing, attunement, and slipstreaming are unpacked in the following section. These are described as together creating a responsive research framework for exploring TAP’s dynamic, transformative processes.

Reflective research methods can provide educationally valuable insights (Hill, 2017). Reflection sees the researcher aiming to represent reality as it appears – much like light bouncing off a surface to produce an image. In contrast, diffraction accounts for the ways in which light, or meaning, bends, disperses, and transforms through entanglement with various elements in the research assemblage. Diffractive analysis highlights the researcher, participants, and materials coalescing in dynamic relationship (Fox & Alldred, 2014). This allows for difference, change, and single variance, such as one-off events, rather than solely focusing on repeated common, core themes (Barad, 2007). This method is well-suited for studying the fluid and multisensory nature of play, where both human and non-human elements (such as time, art materials, sensory experiences, and the play environment) are in active relationship, shaping and being shaped by one another.

In the context of researching TAP with toddlers, diffractive analysis emphasises the importance of considering how actions, gestures, and materials move to create moments of expression that are transitory and intra-active rather than fixed and static. Intra-action refers to how agents actively shape and reshape each other within often-distinctive dynamic relationships of play, rather than acting as separate, independent entities (Barad, 2007). As Lenz Taguchi (2009) notes, play is not a simple sequential transaction or interaction, but rather a fluid intra-action, whereby both the child and the materials are active agents. This perspective can provide the researcher with an understanding of toddlers as engaged participants in an assemblage of play, where materials (such as clay, paint, or fabric) are actively influencing the direction of creative play, and vice versa. The artworking play space TAP provides can be a space to hold that assemblage of relational intra-actions within which active agents co-create.

This was mirrored in the arts-based research via nomadic artworking. Nomadic artworking was developed by the researcher as an iterative, research practice that extends the artworking space from the classroom into the research methodology, enabling a fluid, non-sedentary mode of inquiry. Rooted in the concept of nomadic analysis (Cole, 2013; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), this method embraces movement and intra-action as a way to attune to the sensory-rich moments that shape both researcher and research. Nomadic artworking involved the researcher re-engaging with similar TAP materials in a different location, responding intuitively to embodied traces of past encounters. This practice offered a mode of reflexivity, allowing the researcher to process and be shaped by the TAP experiences in a manner that was sensorial, and open-ended. As such, nomadic artworking functioned in the research as an empathic bridge between lived experience and reflective inquiry.

Using diffractive analysis allowed for a nuanced view of artworking in which each moment was taken to offer potential for new connections and insights into the development of the participants. This included the researcher’s positioning within the assemblage (Hill, 2017), acknowledging how that influenced the artworking, and how the researcher’s perspective changed in response to the intra-actions observed. When studying TAP, particular features of diffractive methodology emerged as the participants and the materials intra-acted (Palmer, 2011). In these ways the methodological distinctiveness of diffractive analysis provided an innovative and responsive academic study. What developed was a bespoke methodology that is finely tuned to explore the complexities of artworking; open-ended, sensory-rich creative processes; and the often-overlooked, distinctive affordances of art therapy practices in early childhood.

Diffraction, reflexive practice, and reflection

This article uses the terms ‘diffraction’, ‘reflexive practices’, and ‘reflection’ to refer to different but related processes. Diffraction, drawn from Barad (2007), describes research methods that position the researcher within the inquiry, tracing intra-actions with human and non-human agents in the TAP artworking space. Reflexive practice, or reflection-in-action (Van Lith & Voronin, 2016), re-centres the human, highlighting responsive roles within the artworking event. Reflection refers to cognitive and creative processes; reading, writing, artworking, and dialogue. A critically reflective practice asks questions about the journey so far, and the journey to come, toward more open, inclusive, mindful decision making (Jefferson & Anderson, 2017). The TAP study and its findings (some of which are outlined below) offer a philosophical position informed by new materialism, as well as foundational ideas and terminology to support the extension of artworking in educational settings.

Artworking

The process art that is activated in a TAP space is characterised as ‘artworking’. Artworking is a concept that became visible in this study as a dynamic, intra-connected process of artistic creation, enabling an experience of the states of belonging, being, and becoming. Artworking processes and products are continuously (re)shaped by participants’ engagement with various elements such as materials, time, people, sounds, and spaces. Artworking fosters a state of flow and movement: continuities emerge that support individual and collective expression, creating a shared set of connections between all active agents.