Molly Mullen

This introductory chapter situates Artful Evaluation within the dynamic landscape of participatory arts, health, and wellbeing in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Arising from the 2023 Precarity, Creative Arts, and Wellbeing Symposium, the chapter foregrounds the need to re-evaluate evaluation itself—challenging dominant social impact paradigms and advocating for methods that reflect the holistic, embodied, and relational nature of arts-based practices. It explores how creative methodologies, Indigenous knowledge systems, and transdisciplinary approaches are reshaping conceptions of value, evidence, and impact. In critiquing standardised, instrumentalist frameworks, the authors call for a move towards more ethical, context-sensitive, and co-designed evaluation practices that reflect the lived experiences of communities. The chapter also introduces ‘artful evaluation’ as an agile, critical, and creative practice that integrates evaluation into the artistic process. This book, therefore, aims to shift evaluative discourse and practice by placing values, equity, and imagination at the centre of participatory arts in health and wellbeing.

This concluding chapter synthesises the central themes of Artful Evaluation , affirming the need for more nuanced, context-sensitive approaches to evaluating participatory arts practices. Challenging dominant social impact paradigms, the chapter outlines the principles of “artful evaluation”, which embraces relationality, embodied knowing, imagination, and playful emergence. It highlights the value of arts-based methods in fostering holistic understandings of wellbeing and foregrounds evaluation as an embedded, collaborative, and culturally responsive practice. The chapter also situates these ideas within shifting political and policy contexts in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, cautioning against the continuing instrumentalisation and neglect of the arts. In resisting such “artless disregard”, the authors advocate for creative, inclusive, and ethically grounded evaluation practices that align with the values and experiences of practitioners and communities. The chapter ultimately argues for evaluation approaches that are as rich and meaningful as the artistic practices they seek to understand.

Toi Taiao Whakatairanga (TTW) is a three-year transdisciplinary artistic research project based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. TTW explores the ways arts practices can contribute to public awareness of two plant pathogens threatening native tree species – kauri dieback and myrtle rust. The project commissioned and curated Māori artists to create artworks through engaging with iwi (tribes), hapū (sub-tribes), communities, mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and Western science. In this chapter, we discuss two art projects from Te Tai Rāwhiti, on the East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island. TTW is not explicitly a development project, but, we argue, both artworks reveal the ways colonial economic and environmental development initiatives have contributed to species extinction and ecosystem degradation, threatening the continuity of Māori socio-environmental knowledge, health and spiritual and economic well-being. Both works also raise questions about sovereignty and self-determination, and we draw on Māori scholarship to interrogate the extent to which, through the East Coast projects, TTW developed a methodology for curating and researching creative practice that supports the mana motuhake (self-determination and a sense of mana through authority) of Māori iwi and hapū.

This chapter explores the possibilities of interweaving drama and storytelling with mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and Western science to foster students’ ecological understanding and citizenship in relation to ngahere ora (forest health). Our examples of practice come from Toitū Te Ngahere, a participatory, arts-based research project focused on raising awareness of and engagement with two plant pathogens that are threatening native tree species in Aotearoa New Zealand, kauri dieback and myrtle rust. Over two years, the project has worked with five schools to develop, inform and carry out inquiry projects, which involved the children creating artworks to raise awareness of forest health in their communities. In this chapter, we focus on the ways teachers and students (aged 5–14 years) incorporated drama, storytelling and performance into their inquiry projects. We consider each example in relation to mātauranga Māori connected to storytelling and Western drama education scholarship, to explore the capacity of drama and storytelling to engender creativity and agency in relation to forest health issues, involving children in important forms of creative eco-citizenship.

Closure of a forest for biosecurity purposes led to the marginalisation and disconnection of Year 6 children from a local forest of significance to them in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The marginalisation of children’s voices and concomitantly of their knowledge, ideas, and values from environmental issues can be viewed as an example of epistemic injustice, which manifests widely in the environmental area, particularly in relation to marginalised groups. To counter this marginalisation and promote epistemic justice, we explored how the creative arts involving a child-driven environmental communication project could foster children’s sense of agency by supporting the protection of a local forest affected by a tree disease. We show that the creative arts could facilitate the children’s meaningful engagement in environmental issues in a learning environment that fostered child-centric approaches that enabled children to express their visions for sustainable futures in distinctly unique ways that were relevant to them. Furthermore, enabling the children to participate as environmental communicators re-established their relationship with their local forest and re-balanced the power structures that had led to the children’s sense of marginalisation. The insights on how this child-centred relational approach can promote epistemic justice and provide a meaningful contribution to the long-term sustainable management of forest ecosystems has implications for other marginalised groups.

We build a rationale for a nuanced approach to raising public awareness of ecological threats through interweaving art, science, and Mātauranga Māori (Indigenous Māori knowledge). The thinking we present emerges from the first phase of a transdisciplinary project, Toi Taiao Whakatairanga, which explores the ways the arts can raise public awareness of two pathogens that are ravaging native trees in Aotearoa New Zealand: Phytopthora agathidicida (kauri dieback) and Austropuccinia psidii (myrtle rust). One of our first steps in the project was to explore understandings of "public” and “awareness” and their relevance to Aotearoa’s ecological, cultural, and political context. This collective task was about developing theory to guide the second phase of the project, in which we would commission nine Māori artists to create new works about kauri dieback and/or myrtle rust. One of the key outcomes of our collective inquiry was a realization of the limits of certain conceptions of public awareness in the settler–colonial contexts. For example, conceptions based on an unproblematized definition of “public” fail to respond adequately to the rights of Indigenous Māori tribes and subtribes to sovereignty over their lands and taonga species. We identify the need for alternatives to transactional conception of public awareness-raising. This includes alternatives that align with te ao Māori (Māori worldviews) and allow for a lack of consensus about the nature of an ecological threat or the required response. We propose that mātauranga Māori and arts practices can be combined with colonial science knowledge to promote different awarenesses in ways that are responsive to difference audiences, acknowledge different knowledge systems, hold space for contested/provisional knowledge, and support the mana motuhake of iwi/hāpū and the ngahere.