Art includes a huge diversity of practice and a commitment to knowing together and making together. In this book, we profile the work of individual poets and we showcase work by young people in poetry and visual images. We also articulate an approach to knowing through art, in that we recognise the need for artists as individuals to intervene and change the world. The process of making involves a process of change.

In our previous research on artists and what they did, we called this aspect of making art the artist's ‘ego’ (Pahl et al, 2017). Cassie Limb (see Chapter Twenty) can call up her experiential knowledge of form and shape to explore a sensory vision of the world with the girls she worked with. Zahir Rafiq's vision of the portraits (see Chapter Eighteen) comes partly from his own skill and experience, but is also visionary.

Making art can be a wrought process, a skill that is honed over time, such as the poems, but it is also fresh, anew. The poetry and the images in this book call up experience that is complex, entwined with place, but also wrought through complex experience that maybe does not reach mainstream media. Experience is also captured through art. In Shahin Shah's chapter (see Chapter Seven) it is possible to visualise some of the oral stories told by older South Asian community members – the vivid colours; the artistic lens enhances what has been told. Artists refresh and bring to life stories through images, often ‘saying what has been unsaid’ by the oral storyteller.

Working with artists sometimes means changing gear, and recognising different perceptions of the world. It might mean seeing things through the lens of the material, the situated, or the embodied, surfacing ‘material knowledge’ in Paul Carter's words (2004). Art as knowing can be developed through conversations, walks, in moments of interaction that create spaces for more things to happen. Art is a process, and here we think about how things emerge – stuff comes from stuff: trying, helping, working, making, talking – new ideas come from doing. By this, we mean that as we created this book, and the artworks were developed, we learned from each other, and listened to each other's stories.