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Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to introduce visual methods and, more specifically, arts-based forms of visual methods, as an innovative and emerging research approach within the study of sport and physical culture. The chapter examines the use of art and aesthetics as research data and as a representation issue. It draws upon the case of a research-based arts exhibition to represent and communicate research on bodies.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter details an international collaborative research project exploring the impact of health policies and their imperatives on schools in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. The research formed the focus of an arts-based exhibition involving artists’ interpretations of the authors’ research findings. The chapter addresses salient epistemological and ontological issues of ‘representation’ and ‘interpretation’ in visual methods.

Findings – The chapter reveals how the use of arts-based approaches to research do not simply ‘represent’ research, but are constructive in the generation of new insights and forms of knowledge.

Research limitations/implications – The challenges of using arts-based and visual approaches to research are highlighted, particularly in terms of issues of knowledge interpretation. The ways in which these methods allow for lines of sight into life that written texts do not are highlighted.

Originality/value – The chapter provides an introduction to the use of arts-based visual methods in sport and physical culture research. Rather than focusing on visual methods solely as an approach to the collection of data, the chapter extends the discussion around visual methodology to include its use as a form of interpretation that generates and translates knowledge from a new perspective.

When historical visibility has faded, when the present tense of testimony loses its power to arrest, then the displacements of memory and the indirections of art offer us the image of our psychic survival. To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalencies and ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction, or its sundering and splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire for social solidarity: ‘I am looking for the join…I want to join…I want to join’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 18).This chapter follows points and practices of cultural and legal suture. My aim is to trace a thematic excursion into the unremarked or culturally unseen spaces that repeatedly inter dead bodies. This task is rewarded by aesthetic practice excavating a site of repression, a site that confesses our flight from, but necessary management of, dead bodies within cultural spaces. To achieve this, my attention turns to a State-owned graveyard on Hart Island, located in Long Island Sound, New York. Hart Island is a graveyard for New York’s poor, unclaimed or unknown dead – what is commonly known as a “potter’s field.”¹ It is a place where law and art intersect in remarkable absence of any significant cultural claim on the island, and it is a landscape where the failings of forensic conclusion are now mingling with an aesthetic revelation.

Pain is socially and culturally experienced. This chapter builds on previous research into the value of visual images for communicating pain in the UK, which evidenced ways in which images can improve doctor–patient interaction. It discusses ways in which photographs co-created with people living with chronic pain can be catalysts for discussion of pain and suffering in a range of cultural contexts, including higher education and healthcare training. We draw on a pilot project in Delhi, India where images were used as stimuli to dialogue and exploration of shared understanding of pain and current work in UK higher education using visual and other participatory methods. Students have a chance to work with and discuss images which depict qualities and characters of pain. Through seeing and hearing about patients’ experiences of pain, students learn about the commonalities and diversities in people’s experiences of their bodies and minds and how these impact on lives. As future health professionals, their own responses to this are important. Chronic pain can be a disabling condition leaving people vulnerable, with their sense of self and how they are seen by others threatened. People living with pain have to (re)negotiate their identity, with themselves and others, to see who they can be, as well as what they can do in this new state. Exploration of this through visual arts and verbal participatory activities can provide otherwise untapped insights and understandings of the human condition and its diversity. Exploring ways in which this approach could be extended to and adapted to other contexts are part of our future plans.