We’re excited to share that our Creative Director, Rebecca Swift, has contributed a chapter to Care Aesthetics and the Arts, published by Routledge!

Multi-sensory improvisation, radical relationships and ‘deep hanging out’ – tracing reciprocal care within a differently disabled/abled ensemble discusses our Ambient Jam programme; it examines reciprocity of care and creativity between people labelled with PMLD (profound and multiple learning disabilities) and an interdisciplinary team of artists within a longstanding programme of movement and live music improvisation.

Guided by the concept of in-between aesthetics, this inquiry explores how sensory improvisation enables the relational space, dissolving aesthetic hierarchies between art, care, and access. Through care aesthetics, it identifies often invisible and tacit exchanges that unfold between us. This reflection is anchored by two contrasting moments within Ambient Jam where reciprocal care manifests in unexpected ways: through undoing doing, and spirited wildness.

The polyvocal text weaves together the voices of carers, artists, disabled artists, and family members, reflecting a communal embodied inquiry within a society that values words over sensory ways of knowing. It grapples with the fact that rich, sensory ways of communicating shared by people labelled with PMLD are translated here into a form they cannot access. To retrieve information lost in translation, photos and abstract paintings by disabled artist Hannah James are threaded throughout, offering another way to convey experience.

Rebecca’s chapter is available to read online here: Ambient Jam | 21 | Multi-sensory improvisation, radical relationships

Congratulations to Rebecca and all the other authors featured in the book!

Main image: a painting by our Associate Director, Hannah James, inspired by sunlight shining through a window (seen by Ambient Jam member Lennard, as mentioned in Rebecca’s chapter).

If you would like to order a copy of the book, here is a code for 20% discount: Discount Code – Care Aesthetics and the Arts