Art as Method, Science as Practice

How can art reshape the way we produce and relate to knowledge in transdisciplinary (TD) work? This question guided the Art & Science session at Utrecht University’s Transdisciplinarity Day on June 4th, 2026, where academics, practitioners, and artists explored how embodied, creative practices can expand conventional understandings of knowledge.

Reframing Knowledge: From Definitions to Experience

The session opened with a simple prompt: What is knowledge? Participants’ responses, ranging from information and expertise to experience, imagination, and relationships, immediately revealed its plurality. Rather than settling on a definition, the session treated knowledge as something dynamic, relational, and continuously in the making.

Art in Practice: Health and Environmental Contexts

Two examples illustrated how artistic approaches operate within broad transdisciplinary contexts.

At the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital, Sasja Schepers and Kennan van Gelder presented Imagination in the Green, a collaborative project using nature-based theatre with children facing complex health conditions. Theatre creates a space where patients, families, and healthcare providers can engage beyond clinical roles, using storytelling, movement, and nature to surface embodied experiences. In this setting, knowledge is not only verbal or diagnostic, it is felt, enacted, and co-created. Importantly, nature helps rebalance relationships between caregivers and patients, enabling more open and equal dialogue.

Artist Mariko Hori, reflecting on her residency at KWR Water Research Institute, described participatory art practices that rethink human relationships with water. Moving beyond scientific definitions (e.g. H₂O), her work invites people to experience water as relational and lived. While science and art both engage with uncertainty, she noted that art uniquely mobilizes intuition and emotion, extending understanding where precise language reaches its limits.

Three Modes of Engagement in Transdisciplinary Work

Vanessa Timmer presented a framing of three “modes of engagement” to clarify possible relationships between art and climate change by David Maggs, Metcalf Foundation on Arts and Society:

1. Greening the sector – measuring and minimizing climate impacts associated with artistic activities
2. Raising the profile – communicating scientific knowledge more effectively, advocating for policy change through art.
3. Reauthoring the world – activating the unique creative capacities of the arts sector to build an imaginative horizon of the post-fossil world, rallying citizens with courage and heart to strive towards these green and just futures.

Sometimes we think that art can only be used in mode 2, as part of a communications or advocacy strategy, however artistic practices are also especially powerful in mode 3, enabling new imaginaries and inquiry-based ways of relating to complex challenges.

Creative Exercise: Collective Meaning-Making Through Composition

The core of the session was a collective exercise in which participants created temporary installations inspired by the phrase: “Drying is a slow process — of landscapes, of bodies, of imagination, of empathy. What happens to us also happens to nature.” Working with simple unrelated household materials, groups engaged in an open-ended process of building, adjusting, and reinterpreting their compositions, exploring how meaning, knowledge, and ways of being can emerge collectively through relationships, attention, composition and collaboration. 

Several insights emerged:

• Meaning evolved through process: installations constantly changed, with no fixed endpoint or “correct” outcome.
• Embodied and sensory engagement mattered: participants relied on touch, intuition, and observation, especially in how materials interacted with water and sustainability.
• Uncertainty became productive: instability (e.g. wobbling structures, leaking elements) prompted reflection on fragile systems and unpredictable futures.
• Relationships shaped understanding: objects gained new meaning through their interaction with each other and their environment.

Participants noted that the exercise generated forms of understanding difficult to access analytically. It prompted questions rather than answers: What remains hidden until conditions change? Who decides when something is finished? How do small shifts create larger systemic effects? Precisely some of the questions and approaches we are grappling with also in transdisciplinary research settings. 

Key Reflections for Transdisciplinary Practice

In the closing dialogue, participants returned to the question of knowledge with expanded perspectives. Several themes stood out:

• Knowledge as relational and experiential: emerging through interaction, not just transmission.
• The role of imagination and emotion: essential for engaging with complexity and uncertainty.
• Inclusivity of perspectives: artistic processes allow multiple interpretations without privileging a single “correct” one.
• Process over product: meaning develops through iterative, exploratory practice.

One insight was particularly striking: whereas professional practice often seeks to capture and stabilise meaning (projectify, enable outcomes and impact), artistic approaches can precede and open it, revealing which powerful questions emerge and what resonates with actors before processes become formalised.

Why It Matters

The session demonstrated that art is not simply a tool for communicating science, but a method for doing transdisciplinary work in an emergent, flexible and adaptive form. By engaging senses, emotions, and imagination, artistic practices create spaces for dialogue that extend beyond purely analytical knowledge systems. They also help surface marginalized ways of knowing and rebalance relationships between participants.

For TD practitioners, this suggests a need to more fully integrate artistic approaches, not as add-ons, but as core methodologies that enrich how knowledge is produced, shared, and transformed.

Concluding Thought

Returning to the opening question, knowledge emerged not as something fixed, but as institution, imagination, trust, experience, and shared sense-making. The session did not aim to define knowledge conclusively. Instead, it expanded it, demonstrating that in transdisciplinary work, knowing is as much about how we engage as what we know.

Insights from the Art & Science Session at UU Transdisciplinarity Day (June 4, 2026)

Contributors: Sasja Schepers (Senior Researcher at Wilhelmina Kinderziekenhuis), Kennan van Gelder (Physician, Care Ethicist & Founder of the Art of Caring Foundation), Mariko Hori (Artist), Vanessa Timmer (OneEarth Living, Utrecht University), Lisa Andrews (KWR Water Research Institute, Utrecht University)