Donna Frost

Nature of professional artistry 193 6 The background picture in Figure 6 . 7 is a photo of two Evoke (Stokes, 2011 ) association cards. These cards were chosen by the husband of a woman recently admitted to a long term care home for people living with dementia. This man had been struggling to care for his wife at home for a long time and he was experiencing a complex and confusing range of emotions now that she was living in the residential home. He described Mara’s (RN within the RN inquiry) support to be enlightening and chose a traffic light to represent her helping him work out his own signals about safety, being worried about his wife’s safety and learning to live with the idea that it was now a shared responsibility. He explained that Mara had helped him understand his wife’s and his own signals of feeling safe or unsafe and had helped him articulate them. “ She helped me see what I needed to do to feel good about this situation. […] But then, that is not surprising, she has seen this all before. ” (RNI- 2012 Fam 05 -Con-p 8 ). When discussing this feedback with Mara she explained that it felt different for her. She did not have the idea that she had had to explain things to this man. Although she recognised that he was struggling and felt it to be important to talk to him, she did not recall offering any tips or insights drawn from her experiences with other residents and family members. Rather she remembers being curious as to what would emerge as the crux of the struggle for this particular man, and she didn’t know in advance what the particular issues were that would come to the foreground in his response to either the situation or his conversations with her. The issues and potential useful strategies became clear, and came into being, during her work with him. For this person it felt like Mara ‘already knew’ what the answer would be, and so he talked of her as an expert guide. When working with the now and the not yet it is therefore not always apparent to the other that the ‘not yet’ is not familiar or known to the nurse. This pattern of engagement may feel, to the patient, resident or family member, like the second pattern of engagement, working with the parts and the whole. But to the nurse practising with professional artistry it does feel different, giving this third pattern of engagement a distinct quality. This quality was captured particularly well in a creative expression made by Margaret during an NP inquiry meeting in response to the accounts of practice and practice observations being presented (see Figure 6 . 8 ). In this painting the bright yellow in the centre represents the present focus of the practitioner and the orange represents the background. The darker green parts are potential new foci, coalescing out of the unfolding situation (the more diluted yellow-green). These green and yellow-green elements illustrate the movement within and emergent nature of practice episodes in general and in particular those under consideration during this NP inquiry meeting.