Published:
December 2023

Issue:
Vol.18, No.2

About the creator

  • Professor Emerita Jan Allen has worked as an educator for 40 years. She has taught in mainstream universities, alternative education settings with at risk youth and adults, and more recently at The MIECAT Institute. Jan retired from her position as Director and Academic Leader at MIECAT a few years back and since has been supervising doctoral candidates, marking PhD theses, and from time to time running staff supervision groups and professional development workshops. Jan's interests include arts-based inquiry, post qualitative research and mixed media arts making.

This work is published in JoCAT and licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND-4.0 license.

  • Allen, J. (2023). Becoming painting, becoming painted – a beginning with no end. Multimodal showings. JoCAT, 18(2). https://www.jocat-online.org/c-23-multimodal-allen

Becoming painting, becoming painted – a beginning with no end

Jan Allen

We touch

skin

on paper

and with this movement everything changes

we have black fingers,

smudged charcoal.

We both glow in the half light

and equally

we are dull, yearning

for orange.

Another light touch

barely meeting

we three (including brush) vibrate colour

and then separate so the

spaces between us grow

we are in a new relationship

and we wait for a calling

 

it’s the ocean’s edge of blue

at the horizon

that becomes present

in the room

their/its

proxy

a

bleu fonce

posca pen…

Jan Allen, Reorient, 2022, mixed media.

Multimodal showings

The most immediate way of sharing multimodal working is through sharing multimodal expressions. Here you will find other MIECAT artists, facilitators, researchers, creative arts therapists and supervisors inviting you as reader into their experiencing of working multimodally. Each of these contributions was part of an invitation for this explainer. For more information about multimodal creative arts therapy please read the Explainer by Ariel Moy. Published work in this area can be accessed on the Multimodal Creative Arts Therapy explore page.

The art of travel: How multimodal art making is the perfect travel companion / Jacinta McAvoy

Multimodal meanderings / Ariel Moy

Explainer – Working multimodally / Ariel Moy