Each iteration of interprofessionalism and interdisciplinarity has a particular flavour, dominant notes and undertones, an aftertaste that may linger on the reader’s palate. 

Perspectives from the disciplines of psychology and the arts therapies come together in the articles by Tavis Watt, Michelle Buggy and E. James Kehoe, and by Holly Bowen-Salter and their colleagues, to produce evidence of efficacy and suggestions for practice that may have persuasive power with public and private providers of clinical care. These are mixed-discipline as much as mixed-method approaches, in which the need to systematise and standardise approaches to research and practice so that they are measurable and publicly accountable sits in acknowledged tension with person-centred, emergent and creative approaches. 

A dramatherapist and visual art therapist draw on their history of working together to co-conduct an intermodal workshop at the inaugural joint conference of ACATA and ANZATA, a precursor to the formation of ANZACATA. Joanna Jaaniste and Suzanne Perry take a grounded theory approach to the surveys filled out on the spot by the workshop participants. In doing so they discover that their trauma-informed approach may resonate with the participants’ experience of being plunged into the uncertainty of a professional ‘identity crisis’, at the same time that the movement of art-into-drama performatively catches new possibilities in the making. 

Memories shared across Zoom of this conference in Perth 2018, and Catherine of this workshop: an overflowing room, smell of crayons and the rustle of papers, the gentle buzz of shared stories from our art, once–quiet corridors alive with small dramas as participants spilled out beyond the allocated space, colourful fabrics and props out of nowhere, together again, tender stories enacted. Delight in art and drama coming together, learning edges faced.

The works of emerging authors published in this issue also span a range of epistemological and methodological positions. The sensually and socially evocative work of the four Singaporean art therapists, Yoko Choi Chi Mei, Roshni Bhatia, Boo Xu Ning and Lee Shulian, working collaboratively with community, has become a touchstone for this editorial. Two articles from the same graduate cohort as each other typify the contemporary diversity of the arts therapies and the spectrum of relationships to its histories/herstories/theirstories. An art therapist of colour, Kirthana Selveraj puts herself personally and politically on the line with a searing and intellectually brilliant critique of the Eurocentricism of art therapy education. It was Selveraj’s critical appropriation of the genre of self-portraiture that inspired the idea for the cover of this edition of JoCAT. Another graduate of the same art therapy program, Sylvia Marris, reminds us that the individual case study – once the dominant genre in the art therapy literature – can be taken up with humility to see beyond diagnostic labels and generate fresh insights. Returning to Japan from her studies at Whitecliffe, Ayaka Shima offers a creative response bracketed by the expression of gratitude to her teachers and a special memorial to her father. Shima embraces the philosophy and practice of kotodama in order to integrate her emergent sense of soulful connection through creativity into her life at home. As Jessie Brooks-Dowsett suggests, “we are/ formed and informed/ reframed, reordered and remade through/ experience” (p.92).

As an editorial team across Australia and Aotearoa, Zoom is our usual meeting sp(l)ace, with perhaps an in-person meeting once a year or at conferences. In and out of different Covid-19 lockdowns, we too are at home yet slightly estranged from ourselves and our communities; we too are looking for soulful and material connections. The thread of responses to the pandemic that linked many of the contributions to the 2020 issue is not especially evident in this iteration of JoCAT, something that surprised us as editors introducing this edition, and meeting by Zoom in the middle of greater Sydney’s lockdown. Across our submitting authors and readership these in-and-out-of-lockdowns are a way of life – sometimes coinciding, other times, not, slipping across each other and remaining distinct, like Natalie Kang’s coloured sands. Perhaps, creative arts therapists have begun to live with Covid-19 in ways that no longer invite its consideration onto the centre stage?

It is to this editorial location we re-turn. Despite living barely five kilometres from each other on Darug and Gundungurra Country, in neighbouring Blue Mountains villages linked by a winding backroad, we could not sit together to savour the feast of possibilities provided by our authors. No wonder we are attracted to the materiality and metaphor of kitchen spices – the textures, perfumes and colours of the domestic-turned-work spaces where we are obliged – and also blessed – to spend these moments. We invite you now into the richly perfumed flavourful feast of JoCAT 16(1) 2021, and perhaps into your spice cupboards.