A transdisciplinary practice combines and goes beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries to create new approaches. (Hutchison, 2022) It aims to develop a holistic understanding and innovative solutions to complex problems by including perspectives from various fields, stakeholders, and types of knowledge. This practice emphasizes collaboration, co-creation, and the use of community insights and practical expertise to address real-world challenges comprehensively and inclusively. (Total Communication, 2019)

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The benefits of transdisciplinary work include crossing and blending disciplines. Combining art and science within this framework can be advantageous for both scientists and artists. Starting a conversation between them can spark new ideas.

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I have always been passionate about both sport and art, and I've sought ways to combine them. I've created pieces addressing major issues in sports, such as stigma, stereotypes, and sexism, with art serving as the voice to highlight these problems. My previous works have included pieces like Brandi Chastain's iconic moment and its associated stereotypes and sexism, along with memorabilia that involves the audience. (Maëlle Thivat, 2023)

 

Building on my previous experience, I am now focusing on sports injuries and the menstrual cycle, a topic that is rarely discussed both in sports and in general. My project will explore different types of stigma—self-stigma, structural stigma, and public stigma—particularly in the context of sport.

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Combining the opposites of sport and art, much like the contrast between science and art, can create innovative and meaningful connections. Both pairings bridge different worlds, offering fresh perspectives and inspiring new ideas.(The Oxford Scientist, 2022) 

 

I will use social science methods, such as cyanotypes and autoethnographic techniques within photo voice, to examine self-stigma. Additionally, I will explore the connections between social science, sport, and art, particularly focusing on team experiences and structural stigma. I have reached out to social science experts, including Dr. Amy Whitehead, to discuss further and incorporate psychological perspectives within sport.

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For my research, I will engage athletes in a photovoice project to explore stereotypes and stigma. This method allows the use of images to convey powerful messages, making it easier for athletes to share their stories. Additionally, it enables other audience members to connect with or interpret these stories in their own way, fostering deeper understanding and engagement.

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Methodology for Reflection:

Gibbs' Reflective Cycle is a structured model for reflection developed by Graham Gibbs in 1988. It encourages a systematic approach to analyzing experiences to learn and improve for future situations. The cycle includes six stages:

1. Description – What happened?

2. Feelings – What were you thinking and feeling?

3. Evaluation – What was good or bad about the experience?

4. Analysis – Why did things go well or badly?

5. Conclusion – What else could you have done?

6. Action Plan – What would you do differently next time?

This cyclical process is widely used in education, especially in healthcare and teaching, to foster reflective practice and continuous learning, and I have adopted this to reflect upon the ANOTHER ANGLE research project.

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Another Angle

Description 

The 'Another Angle' project explored the social impacts of sports-related injuries, particularly those linked to menstruation, using photovoice as a research method. Photovoice empowers participants by allowing them to document their own experiences visually, placing emphasis on personal narratives rather than external observation.

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In this project, athletes who menstruate were invited to use photography to capture their lived experiences of injury and the stigma surrounding it. The images collected reflected not only the physical consequences of injury but also the emotional and social dimensions — how stigma operates on structural, public, and self-directed levels.

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The outcomes of the project were curated into an exhibition that aimed to spark dialogue, raise awareness, and encourage more inclusive conversations around menstruation and injury in sport. Throughout, ethical considerations were foregrounded: participants’ consent, anonymity, and agency were respected, and audiences were warned that some images might be unsettling.​​​

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Feelings 

At the start, I felt enthusiastic about combining artistic practice with social research. The project’s interdisciplinary nature — blending creative arts, sociology, and health — felt like a meaningful way to bridge my own interests in art and science.

However, I also felt nervous. Menstruation and sports injuries remain taboo topics, and I worried that participants might feel reluctant to engage openly or that audiences might dismiss or avoid the subject matter. There was also an internal pressure: I wanted the project not just to look visually compelling, but to genuinely contribute to dialogue and reduce stigma.

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During the process, I often felt a sense of privilege. Seeing how athletes used photography to express themselves, sometimes with raw honesty, was moving. Some of the images were difficult to look at, both because of the physical realities of injury and because of the stigma they revealed. At those moments, I felt both challenged and inspired — challenged to handle the material sensitively, and inspired by the participants’ bravery.

At the exhibition stage, I felt proud but also protective. Proud that the work sparked conversations and gave visibility to experiences often silenced in sports culture, but protective of the participants, hoping that their work would be received respectfully and not sensationalised.

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Evaluation 

Positive aspects:

• Participant empowerment: Photovoice allowed athletes to frame their own narratives. Rosie said "I feel like I can make my point." Rather than being spoken about, they spoke for themselves, just like the interviews we have but can really share what we think. Katie states "I can tell my story and I am the teller and not coming from someone else." As "I too, also found that its similar to when commentators read your sheet but don't want to say about your background or homelife as it doesn't make us look good, not knowing you had a hard life and younger ones looked up to you. Its just away you can get your story out there." said Lucy.

• Strength of photography: The images were powerful and often more effective than verbal descriptions in conveying the weight of stigma. They also made audiences stop and reflect in a way that text alone might not.

• Awareness-raising: The exhibition format created a public platform for issues that are rarely discussed, fostering dialogue across athletes, researchers, and audiences.

• Ethical responsibility: Careful steps were taken to safeguard participants, demonstrating good practice.

Challenging/negative aspects:

• Emotional difficulty: Some images were unsettling to process, and I sometimes found myself deeply affected.

• Recruitment barriers: Due to the stigma surrounding menstruation, it was not always easy to find participants willing to share openly.

• Balance between art and research: At times, I struggled with whether to prioritise aesthetics (as an artist) or representation and advocacy (as a researcher).

• Audience reception: While many engaged thoughtfully, there was always the risk that some audiences might view the images superficially or uncomfortably rather than critically.

• Very generic feedback, as perhaps people don't want as it might be personal  to them. I got more formal feedback through focus groups.

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Analysis ​

The effectiveness of the project was closely linked to the methodological choice of photovoice, which aligned strongly with the research aims. By foregrounding participants’ perspectives, photovoice directly challenged the silence surrounding menstruation and sports injuries. Photography proved especially valuable in capturing nuanced and personal experiences that would have been difficult to articulate through academic writing or structured interviews alone. Leiper, Scruby, and Meagher-Stewart (2014) Conducted a photovoice study on Curling and rural women, focusing on their participation in playing and socialising. 

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Nevertheless, several challenges emerged. The sensitivity of the subject matter and wider societal stigmas created notable barriers. Menstruation continues to be framed as a private or even shameful issue, while sports injuries are often perceived as a sign of weakness. These cultural dynamics constrained recruitment and, in some cases, limited the extent to which participants felt able to disclose their experiences.

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Further complexity arose from the dual demands of combining artistic practice with research ethics. Ensuring accurate representation and safeguarding participants’ wellbeing occasionally conflicted with the desire to produce visually striking and engaging outcomes. This tension required careful negotiation and constant critical reflection on the balance between artistic intention and ethical responsibility.

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Similar dynamics were evident in the application of the cyanotype process, where technical variations influenced outcomes. Overexposure resulted in prints that were overly dark and obscured detail, while underexposure produced pale images with limited contrast. Although these outcomes initially appeared as technical shortcomings, they later became a productive element of the practice. In particular, the contrasts between darker and lighter prints provided opportunities for experimentation within collage, enhancing the visual impact of the work.

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When considered together, photovoice and cyanotype demonstrate a shared reliance on unpredictability and interpretation. Both methods involve a degree of surrendering control — in photovoice, to participants’ choices in representing their experiences, and in cyanotype, to the uncontrollable variables of light and exposure. In each case, outcomes that initially appeared problematic or incomplete became valuable sites for reflection and reworking. This parallel highlights the importance of reflexivity within practice-based research, where challenges are not merely obstacles but integral to generating richer, more layered understandings.

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Conclusion 

In hindsight, I could have strengthened the dialogic element of the project. While the images were powerful, creating more opportunities for participants to share verbal reflections — through group discussions, interviews, or written captions — would have provided additional layers of meaning.

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I also recognise that more preparation could have been given to audiences. Providing information packs, support resources, or expert commentary (e.g., from sports scientists or healthcare professionals) might have helped them engage more deeply and responsibly with the themes.

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Additionally, I could have incorporated more systematic evaluation measures, such as collecting audience feedback, to assess the actual impact of the exhibition on stigma reduction and dialogue. This would strengthen the project’s academic contribution and provide evidence for future work.

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Action Plan (Next Steps) 

• Enhanced participant support: Provide structured debrief sessions or peer-support opportunities so that participants can process their involvement in a safe environment.

• Broader inclusivity: Expand recruitment to include athletes from a wider range of sports, cultures, and competitive levels to capture more diverse experiences.

• Stronger audience engagement: Include supplementary materials (leaflets, talks, panel discussions) alongside the exhibition to contextualise the images and provide educational value.

• Impact assessment: Collect rich collective feedback from audiences to evaluate the project’s influence on attitudes and dialogue around menstruation and injury. This might include pre and post questionnaires. 

• Researcher self-care: Develop strategies for managing my own emotional responses, ensuring I remain sensitive to the subject while protecting my wellbeing.

• Future collaborations: Partner with sports organisations, healthcare practitioners, or advocacy groups to increase reach and embed the research within real-world contexts.

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You Are Not Alone

 

Description 

You Are Not Alone is an ongoing art project developed during the Transdisciplinary Practice module. The project explores stigma within sport, focusing on women’s health and wellness, and aims to empower and educate athletes through creative expression. Unlike Another Angle, which primarily used photography, You Are Not Alone experiments with painting and other art forms, adopting an autoethnographic approach that blurs the lines between fine art, social commentary, and research practice.

The project responds directly to the outcomes of Breaking Boundaries and Another Angle, carrying forward themes of stigma, inclusivity, and empowerment, but translating them into a new artistic language. Early outcomes involved paintings that attempted to visualise stigma in sport, while future iterations will expand into other media.  As part of Major Project, the broader aim is to challenge perceptions, initiate dialogue, and contribute to more inclusive sporting communities.

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Feelings 

When beginning You Are Not Alone, I felt a mixture of continuity and risk. Continuity, because the project builds naturally on my previous work — stigma in sport and female athletes’ experiences — but also risk, because shifting from photography (a participant-led, documentary method) to painting (a more personal, interpretive medium) felt uncertain.

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Initially, I worried whether painting could convey the same authenticity and immediacy as photovoice. I also questioned my ability to represent participants’ experiences without speaking for them or misinterpreting their realities. At the same time, I felt excited by the creative freedom painting offered, allowing me to move beyond documenting and into expressing the emotional weight of stigma in more abstract or symbolic ways.

As I developed the first series of paintings, I began to feel more confident.

 

The act of painting became a process of reflection in itself — I could channel both participants’ narratives (from previous projects) and my own responses as an artist-researcher. There was also a sense of responsibility: I wanted the work to be visually engaging but also socially meaningful, sparking conversations rather than being read purely as personal or aesthetic exploration.

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Evaluation​

Positive aspects:

• Creative development: Moving into painting allowed me to expand my artistic practice and explore new ways of representing stigma.

• Integration of past research: The project built meaningfully on insights from Breaking Boundaries and Another Angle, showing progression rather than repetition.

• Engagement potential: The visual language of painting, especially when combined with text or mixed media, has strong potential to provoke dialogue and challenge perceptions in different ways to photography. It acknowledges and values the subjective and emotional aspects of individual experiences and connects to larger issues by aiming to relate personal experiences to broader social, cultural, or political issues (Harrison et al., 2022)

• Flexibility: The autoethnographic approach gave freedom to experiment and not be confined by traditional categories of art or research. Bartleet (2021) states that autoethnography enables the artist-researcher to reflect on their own personal experience while situating it within a broader cultural, social, or political context

Challenging aspects:

• Authenticity concerns: Without participant-produced material (like in photovoice), I sometimes felt uncertain about whether my paintings adequately represented lived experiences.

• Interpretation risk: Audiences may read paintings more subjectively, which can dilute or distort the intended social message.

• Balancing roles: Again, there was tension between producing compelling art and fulfilling research objectives — this time even more pronounced because painting is inherently more personal.

• Ongoing nature: As the project is still developing, I sometimes felt frustrated by the lack of closure or measurable outcomes compared to completed exhibitions like Another Angle.

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Analysis 

The positive outcomes of You Are Not Alone were largely due to building on a strong foundation. Previous projects had already established a clear thematic direction, allowing me to concentrate on form and medium rather than concept. In this context, painting became a way to add emotional and symbolic depth that photography alone could not capture, enabling a different register of reflection on stigma and embodiment.

However, the shift in methodology also introduced challenges. Photovoice inherently centres participant voices, whereas painting relies heavily on my own interpretation.

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This created a tension: how to maintain social authenticity while embracing personal expression. Without direct participant involvement, there was a risk that the work could appear removed from lived experience, even as it sought to represent it. Audience reception was similarly complex. Photographs often elicit immediate recognition and empathy, while paintings invite slower, more interpretive engagement—something that can enrich understanding, but also risks misreading or disengagement.

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These tensions were most visible in the production of highly detailed works such as the helmet and tampon pieces. I invested significant time in ensuring accuracy and precision, reflecting a desire to ground the work in recognisable realities. Yet paradoxically, I also learned the value of stepping back and acknowledging the achievement already realised, rather than endlessly pursuing refinement. Painting, by its nature, demands time and labour, which initially seemed to legitimise it as “real art.” However, through parallel experimentation with cyanotypes, I came to recognise the equal artistic and conceptual weight of this medium, particularly given the technical challenges of exposure, contrast, and composition.

 

What initially seemed unpredictable or secondary became an important part of my practice, especially when integrated into collage alongside painting. For instance, juxtaposing cyanotype imagery with the tampon painting created layered visual dialogues, reinforcing the interplay of precision, abstraction, and material process.

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Through these methodological and material explorations, I learned to balance detail with perspective, authenticity with expression, and labour with experimentation—an approach that strengthens the project’s ability to communicate stigma while also pushing the boundaries of what counts as art in this research context.

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Conclusion 

Looking back, I could have integrated more hybrid methods — for example, combining participant narratives or photographic references with painting. This would have preserved the authenticity of lived experiences while still allowing for creative interpretation.

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I also recognise that involving participants in responding to or co-creating the paintings might have strengthened the project. Collaborative painting workshops, or inviting athletes to annotate or add to works, could have provided both authenticity and inclusivity.

 

Finally, I could have developed clearer framing for audiences, through exhibition texts or artist statements, to ensure the paintings’ social purpose was foregrounded and not lost in abstraction.

 

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Action Plan (Next Steps) 

• Mixed-media approach: Incorporate photography, text, or direct participant input alongside painting to balance artistic expression with participant authenticity.

• Collaborative elements: Create opportunities for athletes to contribute to the paintings, either directly or through guided workshops, making the process participatory again.

• Audience framing: Develop supporting materials (statements, talks, catalogues) to guide audience interpretation and emphasise the social context.

• Ongoing reflection: Use sketchbooks or journals to document how the act of painting itself reflects or challenges research themes, making the process more transparent.

• Impact measurement: Build in evaluation mechanisms, such as focus groups or feedback sessions, to gauge how audiences interpret the paintings and whether they spark the intended conversations.

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Overall Conclusion​​​​​​​

In In the Line of Play, I presented the helmet self-portrait “Playing Through: Pain, Stigma & the Female Athlete Experience” on an easel, deliberately adopting the visual language of a ‘final artwork.’ Yet, by leaving the piece unfinished, I sought to disrupt the conventions of the art world. This act was inherently autoethnographic: it materialised both my lived experience as a lacrosse athlete and the unfinished, ongoing nature of personal recovery, resilience, and identity. The artwork thus became a bridge between art and sport, illustrating how progress is rarely linear and how stigma can be confronted through vulnerability in process.

Audience responses to this work revealed a productive tension. Many athletes immediately recognised the metaphor of progress, drawing parallels to training and recovery as cyclical, incomplete, and always in motion. Conversely, some art viewers questioned the validity of displaying an “unfinished” work, reflecting disciplinary expectations of completion. One particularly insightful response captured this duality: “It’s better than a blob of coloured paint and that’s the finished product. Here you can see real progress and the behind-the-scenes reality, just like athletes training to be better.” This divergence underscores the cultural differences in how progress, process, and product are valued across sport and art.

Looking forward, I intend to extend this line of inquiry through alternative modes of presentation. Displaying the helmet on a table, rather than an easel, could emphasise its unfinished state while generating curiosity. I am also interested in incorporating a mirror into the installation. This would be conceptually resonant: as a self-portrait, the work already functions as a reflection, and placing it in dialogue with a mirror would invite audiences to see themselves implicated in the themes of stigma, resilience, and embodiment. The helmet would then operate as both protection and reflection—an artefact of sporting culture and a site of self-encounter.

Alongside this, my use of cyanotype printing has been crucial in amplifying athletes’ stories. The medium’s unpredictable, bruise-like impressions are both aesthetic and metaphorical, capturing fragility, endurance, and the visibility of experiences often hidden in sporting culture. As a research method, cyanotypes extend beyond documentation: they enable athletes’ narratives to become material, visible, and affective. This speaks to broader debates in participatory and feminist methodologies, where art is not simply a representational tool but a way of knowing that can challenge silence and stigma.

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The Another Angle and You Are Not Alone projects collectively demonstrate the potential of combining participatory, autoethnographic, and material-based practices. Another Angle foregrounded athletes’ voices through photovoice, situating stigma within wider social and cultural pressures. You Are Not Alone extended this through autoethnographic self-portraiture, positioning my own body as a critical site for interrogating stigma and provoking dialogue. This synthesis reflects my dual perspective as both researcher and high-level athlete, enabling me to integrate lived experience with critical inquiry.

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As an MA Art in Science practitioner, I have developed a nuanced understanding of how creative methods operate at the intersection of research and lived experience. Ethical reflexivity has been central: negotiating between accurate representation and creative experimentation has taught me to listen responsively to participants while also embracing material unpredictability. These insights align with scholarship on embodied research methods, participatory arts, and visual sociology, all of which highlight the power of creative practice to foster empathy, broaden understanding, and catalyse cultural change.

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Ultimately, these projects demonstrate that art does not simply illustrate stigma—it can intervene in it. By combining participatory and autoethnographic approaches, and by situating athletic experiences within artistic research, my practice shows how creative encounters can foster inclusive dialogue around menstruation-related injury and well-being.

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While further research is required to address these issues comprehensively, the integration of art, sport, and science offers a vital mechanism for cultural transformation. In an era where stigma still silences, creative practice provides not only representation but also resistance.

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