Art therapists can tow the EBP line and use its methods to demonstrate what we know to be true: that art therapy is an effective treatment. We need to do the particular kind of research that EBP requires, and we need to do so soon. We need much more inductive, research – both quantitative and qualitative – to build towards the critical mass of hypothetico-deductive research that will demonstrate the effectiveness of different art therapy approaches in particular settings with specific client populations. We need to engage with the whole paradigm and meet the challenges it represents through strategic research and quality assurance initiatives.

But we also need to take risks with the construction of art therapy's evidence base. When the aim is to effect policy there needs to be hard data and rigorous, robust literature, but we should resist exclusively ‘scientific’ notions of research, difficult though it is to change canonical beliefs about what research and the ‘best’ evidence are and what it therefore means for disciplines to become evidence based. We need to do research that goes beyond the orthodox hierarchies of medicine and into the social and the visual. We also need to present art therapy's differing forms of evidence and argue that it be judged according to the values and norms of the discipline. We can make some risky representations too. We can disseminate our evidence and differing researches in different venues to different audiences: through visual display, narrative and performance as well as through text. Visual and oral languages are not incompatible practices; they run in parallel with and complement each other. Why then must we always translate from the visual to the oral, and to text? Display and the performative allow a social inclusion that invites in a wider audience who can become immersed in the material and find meaning as forms of evidence and its dissemination are extended and enlivened.

Using non-EBP-conformist research methodologies may, of course, have consequences. It may mean that content is ignored. Art therapists must make sure that we maintain a politically aware engagement with the paradigm and its practices. EBP is embedded in the systems and organisations where art therapists work but it is sustained through our attitudes towards it. EBP is in our working worlds, in our minds and in our hands. We can challenge the paradigm and add our voice to those who contest its fundamental assumptions. We can trouble both the edges and the heart of EBP's territory. To engage solely with the research and governance procedures of orthodox EBP or to limit art therapy research to social and visual methods, would result in a partial evidence base – either way something would be lost. We can generate the evidence that EBP requires, but we can do so in ways that make it our own.

We need the facts, we need the figures, but we need the stories and the pictures too.