New growth – little shoots
Tomorrow is my last day teaching 3rd year students at Nottingham Trent University. We’ve been working towards building their confidence in communicating about their work, especially in written form. We’ve been thinking about the essentials of communication – understanding your values, your audience, the context of your work – and we’ve delved into the wonderful world of words and how great writing stems from finding good descriptive, emotive and sensory language. Now it’s time to start writing their Artist’s Statements. I’m confident it will go well; we’ve been having some good conversations. What I love about this part is that here I can see the seeds being sown, things that still need a bit of time to mature, but which will eventually emerge, as they do, into the world at their Degree Shows.
As I told them in the first session – one of my core values in my work is Learning & Growth. If I’m not learning and growing (or helping other people to learn and grow, in whatever way they need) then why am I doing it?
It’s something that’s easy to forget when there’s a lot on – the things that are fundamental to our work, the reasons we do it. When I get busy the first thing to disappear is my awareness of the big picture. I become obsessed with detail and tasks. I forget the broad strokes of my work. This week, with the lengthening days and the signs of spring everywhere I look out in the world, I realised that I’ve got my own signs of spring happening inside me, within my work, even if it feels like things are still a bit barren.
The trap of being busy and the value of doing nothing
This week, in my role as Trustee at New Brewery Arts in Cirencester, I went on a three day training course. In many ways I was happy to go – I was looking forward to getting to know the senior management team better, to understand the challenges facing the organisation and to be as useful as I could in supporting them in achieving the vision they have for the future. But, secretly, I was wondering whether I could spare the time.
At the moment I am in the thick of it organising a project which has taken up most of my headspace for the last year. I have what feels like a never-ending list of things to do, so many people I need to keep in contact with and new people to reach out to. There are weekly lists, monthly lists, a year planner and the world’s biggest mind-map on my wall – all of which are to keep me on track, so I don’t miss anything. Perhaps I’m being overly paranoid, but the reality is that it’s just me keeping this thing going; I don’t have a collaborator or team behind me. And, it’s starting to get exhausting.
3 elements of your Creative Practice: artistic work
This month on the blog I’m talking about a structure for thinking about your creative practice which I have borrowed from the DIY MFA writing programme and made applicable for most creative practices:
Output (Creative Work) + Input (Nourish Creativity & Skills) + Community Building = Creative Practice
In last week’s post I looked at Input – the things you do as a creative person to feed your creative well, to nourish your creativity. This week I’m looking at Output – your artistic work, the things you create and produce, both the tangible and the intangible results of your creative endeavour.
Books to inspire: Playing Big
This month’s book recommendation comes with a caveat. Not because it isn’t very good (it really is) but because I feel a bit awkward recommending a book which is aimed so squarely at only half the population. My aim with highlighting books on my blog is to share what I’ve been reading and the things I’ve found enjoyable, provoking and inspiring with the hope you might find them similarly helpful. This book is one of the few ‘personal development’ books I’ve read when I felt like it was written about me, and about people I know. So I couldn’t not tell you about it, despite its narrow focus. I hope you’ll forgive me this once, and I hope you’ll consider reading it no matter how you gender-identify; there are good insights for all in it.
Take it easy on yourself
When I started the blog I naively thought that I would be able to write 3 blog posts a week on 3 different topics. After all, I had lots to say; lots of ideas to share and lots of experiences with makers that I thought other people might find interesting and/or useful. Well, that thought quickly got scaled back when I realised just how much effort it is for me to maintain the routine of posting once a week. Yes, I did have lots of content that I could share, but once most of that was covered, and I had to think up new things on a regular basis- in amongst all my other work and travel- it wasn’t as straightforward as I’d imagined. You’d think that the once-a-week plan would be simple too, but the number of times I’m pulling something out of the bag late on a Tuesday (or even on Wednesday itself) because I’ve only just realised that I have to post something tomorrow! It’s almost comical.
When this happens, which is more often that I would like, my first instinct is not to help myself and be kind: ‘That’s ok Melody, you’ve been busy this week, what can we do now that will make this easier?’ No, instead, it’s to berate myself: ‘You’ve only got to come up with one post and you can’t do that on time!’ You see I hold myself to outrageously high standards and expect myself to meet them all the time, no excuses.
Rushing not reflecting
I am often in a rush. There are lots of things to do (right now!) and I’m always thinking ‘what’s next?’ It feels like I have a tightly wound spring in my chest which keeps me moving in haste. Sometimes I even catch myself not breathing. I am fairly certain that this low-level anxiety is a contributing factor to me finding it hard to stop, even for a moment or two. Looking after myself, stopping to refresh or to reflect, is frequently the lowest priority activity on my list.
I’m a big advocate for regularly taking time to reflect on how things are going, especially in your creative practice. It can be helpful to pause and not jump straight into the next thing. If we take the time to reflect after each big event or body of work, it’s so much easier to navigate a path forward, one that is responsive to our needs and in line with our values.
Harnessing social media for motivation
A couple of weeks ago I took part in a project where I was asked to document all the food I ate, including the waste from the meals, and to reflect on my food/cooking/eating habits. The images and words were to form research for an artist’s new collection of work. I had the option to write a short piece and email some images, but because I’ve been on a social media hiatus (as I talked about here) I thought it might be a good way to get back into the Instagame. But making all this public didn’t feel right, so I set up a private account just for the project.
Don’t forget the big picture!
I have a feeling that this week is a bit frantic for everyone no matter what your creative practice. Whether you have orders to fill or deadlines to meet, this last working week before Christmas, with all the associated activity of the holidays, can be exhausting.
Mindful of how little time you all have to read blog posts right now, I just wanted to touch on the importance of not losing the big picture. With so much to do it’s easy to get blinkered, to become dead focused on what needs doing, that we forget why we are doing these things. And in this momentary forgetting we can lose our energy and motivation.