Artistic and arts-based research, and artful learning more generally, hold specific qualities that can contribute to the development of transdisciplinary hermeneutics. This article reviews these qualities and advocates for an artistic turn in sustainability research, as well as for a turn to a queer-convivialist life-art, enhancing the transdisciplinary experience of qualitative complexity. The article points at early signs of this turn, both in the discourse of 'convivialism' and in sustainability research & education, noticing a trend that hopefully may take up in pace and grow in scale in the coming years, allowing sustainability research to more deeply integrate arts-based research and thereby more fully realize its potential for transdisciplinarity.