Creative Practice as Embodied Care: Disability-Led Visual Art and Pathways to Emotional Well-Being

Abstract

This paper investigates the link between creative practice and emotional well-being through the lens of disability-led visual art. Unlike clinical frameworks that emphasize art as therapy or rehabilitation, we propose viewing creativity as embodied care: a dialogic process of self-knowledge, adaptation, and resistance. Drawing on disability studies and embodied cognition, we examine how disabled visual artists’ bodily experiences shape their aesthetic systems. Qualitative interviews with disabled artists and analysis of their work reveal that sensory-rich engagement with materials, adaptive techniques, repetitive gestures, and spatial adjustments serve to structure affect rather than simply express it. For example, therapists note that rhythmic drawing exercises provide a stabilizing somatic anchor that calms the nervous system. Similarly, artists repurpose tools to extend their sensory reach, what Rice et al. (2024) call “dis-using” technology to create new forms. Disability aesthetics thus emerges as a form of epistemic resistance, challenging medicalized notions of art and mental health. One scholar observes that disability-led art has “transformative potential…in re-imagining an abled-bodied world” by making the familiar unfamiliar. We illustrate these concepts with Indian case examples, from a foot-painter expressing “empathy, love, and bonding” to a major Delhi exhibition reframing disability as “limitless potential” underscoring the global relevance of embodied creativity.