”Jos saisin kosketuksen luovuuteeni”. Fenomenologistaiteellinen tutkimus yliopisto-opiskelijoiden matkanteosta ekspressiiviseen taideterapiaan pohjaavassa oppimisen ympäristössä

The study analyses artistic work based on expressive arts therapy. It explores what kind of understanding artistic work creates and what it discloses about our way of being in the world. Art is seen as arising from our embodied and pre-reflective situation in the world. Multi-sensuous, playful encounters with the world feed imagination. From the perspective of expressive arts therapy, the arts emerge from this basis, and the knowledge about the world is constructed on it. Understanding the images that arise in the embodied relationship to the world is considered central to the processes of knowledge construction. The images are neither static nor merely visual, but can take the form of, for instance movement or words. The research data consists of written descriptions by university students’ who participated in an expressive arts therapy course lasting one academic year. Data was collected from three groups, planned and led by the researcher, who also worked with the students. Following the arts-based research paradigm, the study develops a phenomenological-artistic research method based on expressive arts therapy processes in dialogue with the phenomenology of the body and the phenomenology of poetic imagination. The central tool of this method is “aesthetic dialogue”, which is comparable to phenomenological reduction. The phases of data analysis, with “routes” and “places”, arose in a process of aesthetic dialogue with the students’ descriptions. The study describes the turn that takes place in students’ thinking and learning when art is freed from a position of mere object. It demonstrates how art, when practiced without goals that are set from outside, can enable people to find a direction in life and get deeper touch with their self. The study brings forth perspectives on art, learning, one’s body, self, other people and life that have arisen in aesthetic dialogue, and discusses the main phases and moments of the processes of transformation. It offers perspectives on how to develop applications of the approach in different contexts; and also support for undertaking arts-based research. Key words: Expressive arts therapy, aesthetic dialogue, arts-based research, phenomenological-artistic method.