International Longevity Centre Global Alliance - Designing the Future of Ageing

18 December 2025

Care aesthetics highlights the artistic and sensory skills involved in caring practices. In this interview, James Thompson reflects on how art making and care taking are deeply connected and how this perspective can strengthen health and care practices.

James Thompson is Professor of Applied and Social Theatre at the University of Manchester. He is founder of the Care Lab, exploring artful, creative care and building more caring communities. Furthermore, Thompson founded the TiPP Centre, working on arts in prisons, and In Place of War, to  develop arts programs in places of conflict. He has written several books on applied theatre and other aspects of socially engaged arts practice. Thompson, who just ended a two-month residency at Leyden Academy, is passionate about careful art and artful care. Enough reasons to ask him some questions.

Could you tell us a bit more about the Care Lab?

The Care Lab came out of a research project at the University of Manchester exploring care aesthetics in the context of dementia and older people care. We wanted the work to be open to health care workers, artists, students, researchers and the public. We were hosted in the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and organised seminars, workshops and a Festival of Care.

Furthermore, we invited three artists to develop ‘artful care’ projects. One explored the relationship with her mother living with dementia through photography, another created a network of parents of neurodiverse children and examined ‘art making as parenting’, and the third artist ran a programme of events for people with ‘excessive energy’ exploring how they care for themselves and are cared for by their friends.

What does care aesthetics mean? And could you give an example?

Care is rarely given the status or value it deserves – and care aesthetics is a language to acknowledge the fine skills many people bring to it.

Care aesthetics for me started after witnessing my friend being treated by a physiotherapist and wondering why I found the quality of the care so beautiful. I was interested what it might mean to think of a health care relationship as art-like or think of a care worker as a person with a craft. This led then to exploring different care practices and noticing how they often involved expertise in touch, voice, movement and so forth. The research question became how attending to these sensory practices might improve the provided care. Aesthetics as a word is used to draw attention to these embodied and sensory practices – so a nurse might use a tone of voice and a touch of a hand in a very skilled way, a care worker might hold a person and gently dance with them down a corridor. Each of these is demonstration of an aesthetics of their care.

What did your residency at Leyden Academy entail?

I have been in residence at the academy since the end of September and I have used it to strengthen my connections to the arts in health and care aesthetics movements in the Netherlands. It has been excellent to meet with colleagues here and attend the care aesthetics team meetings led by Tom Maassen. As part of this I have met impressive artists (for example, Nieke Koek and Thomas Johannsen), participated in workshops (for example, on woodworking) and then given talks in Leiden, Utrecht, Arnhem and Rotterdam.

The most exciting developments for me has been a new project with Rosa Spier Huis and the setting up of an international Care Aesthetics Network. The Rosa Spier connection came from meeting their director and staff at the art and dementia festival at the Haarlem Museum of the Mind in October. They have a vision for the home which seeks to celebrate the work of the carers – valuing their ‘artful care’ in the language of care aesthetics – and Tom and I will be working with them over the next year to see how to make this a reality. The network aims to bring together researchers, artists and health professionals interesting in developing the ideas of care aesthetics further. We already have people from eight different countries coming to an online launch on 5^th February 2026.

Can we expect another publication on care aesthetics?

Yes! Being at Leyden Academy has also allowed me to start thinking about a new care aesthetics book. This work will explore care aesthetics within dementia care, but also in other areas of health care, for example neonatal care, working with young neurodivergent people and in palliative care. There is extraordinary research on the importance of touch and ‘skin to skin’ care of small infants, or the creativity of co-regulation practices with children with autism, for example.

I’m trying to frame the writing around a series of archetypes – for example, what does the lullaby teach us about an aesthetic of care? What does this everyday moment, that always combines song and movement, teach us about the close relations between art making and care taking. I will also look at the simple blood test as a moment of importance for an argument about aesthetics in care. Rather than seeing the hard technical medical skills as separate from apparently soft care skills – a positive, experience of blood test, will always be a subtle combination of different sensory skills: applying a torniquet with sensitivity to the shape of an arm, ensuring the patient is relaxed, finding a vein with ease and calm and so forth.

Finally, what message would you like to share with health care professionals, policy makers and the public?

We do not have artists on one side and health care professionals on another. We need expertise in caring, building relationships, supporting recovery and providing healthy environments. These require different qualities of technical skill and aesthetic sensitivities which can be brought by artists, health care professionals, patients and their families alike.

“James Thompson champions both artistic care and caring art. At the heart of his work lies a dual concept: care and aesthetics. For Thompson, care has an aesthetic character; it is bodily work involving perception, feeling, experiencing, and perceiving. Care aesthetics brings this together in art, through art, and with art. It studies and interprets a multitude of practices of artistic care and caring art,” says philosopher Tom Maassen. Read more on this subject in his review of Thompson’s book ‘Care Aesthetics’.

ILC-Netherlands