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Background: This study recognizes artistic practice in clinical spaces as a site of embodied knowledge and builds on work by Fancourt and colleagues, exploring emotion regulation strategies and engagement barriers in arts participation by examining artists’ tacit, moment-to-moment decision-making.

Objectives: To explore artists’ embodied knowledge and professional practice in a hospital setting, including how artists respond to patient barriers to engagement and the subsequent approach/avoid emotional regulation strategies of engagement.

Methods/Results: This mixed-methods study utilizes transcriptions from six Action Learning cycles with n=7 current and former hospital-based artists, representing over 70 years of collective experience, integrated with 350+ patient encounter surveys, to explore professional practices including how artists navigate barriers to engagement with emotional and physical scaffolding. These adaptive methods mirror theoretical models of responsive arts engagement while contributing new insight into real-time embodied adjustments artists make when barriers are heightened within the stressful hospital environment.

Conclusion: Preliminary results show that artistic practice produces sophisticated embodied knowledge that can be systematically understood and used in sustainable training and program development. This extends current frameworks on engagement barriers and highlights the value of practitioner-led research in arts-in-health.