In 2025 I received the Emerging Artist Bursary supported by artsandhealth.ie and funded by the Arts Council and HSE. The award offered protected time to examine my emerging arts practice within arts and health. My original proposal focused on developing a creative programme for children living with long-term health conditions, but once the research began it became clear that I needed to step back further. Before developing new approaches, I needed to understand my own reflective habits: how I interpret situations, document affective experiences, and develop insights that support ethical decision-making for future projects.

If you had asked me six months ago, I would have said reflection was already part of my work. This research made it clear how limited my approach actually was. I wrote the occasional note after a workshop, relied on instinctive observations and memory, or took photographs of small moments, but these habits were irregular and too inconsistent to offer real insight.

When I began approaching reflection more intentionally, I realised how much of my thinking had gone unexamined. I often moved past experiences before understanding what they could teach me. The bursary allowed me to slow down, look more closely, and treat reflection as an important method rather than a by-product. This document provides a concise account of the work completed during the bursary. It sets out the theoretical framing that guided the project, summarises the development of my practice to date, and presents short overviews of the reflective episodes that shaped my learning.

This written format is intended to be read alongside a fuller Research Catalogue exposition, accessed via the accompanying QR code. The exposition contains the complete material: extended written reflections, visual documentation, audio fragments, and scanned notes that cannot be accommodated here (see p. 8 for more details). Together, this document and the online exposition form a single reflective outcome: the written form introduces the thinking, and the exposition shows how that thinking was formed.