Intuitive Threads - Tying Up Loose Ends

January 4, 2024

It seems almost unbelievable that the year of my Intuitive Threads project, funded by a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England, is coming to an end. This time last year I was overwhelmed to find out that my application had been successful. Although this project will officially end in January, I feel like I’m only really getting started with ideas I want to develop in my creative practice and with further research and investigation into ideas around the role of intuition in creativity.

I have to submit an evaluation on the project by the end of January. I started by going through my original budget and comparing it to my actual spending! Well it was a good way to start on the process of reflecting on what I’ve achieved, if I've met my original aims and where I want to go next. Perhaps it being the end of the year and the start of a new one is a good time for this kind of reflection anyway. When I thought about bringing this project to a close, the phrase ‘tying up loose ends’ came to me. This feels appropriate as it seems like it should be a weaving metaphor. I suppose I could also go with ‘tying up loose threads’.

One of those loose ends/threads was wanting to return to and explore in more depth the ideas presented in the article ‘Understanding Creative Intuition’, by Dr Theresa Hardman. I am really grateful to Ruth Leary, Associate Professor at the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick for sending it to me. It's been the most relevant and concise take on creative intuition that I’ve read so far. Having said that, it's taken me a few readings to fully digest and process and I'm sure there's more layers still to unfold in my understanding. I've attempted here to lay out the main points and ideas I’ve taken from it.

The article starts by saying it draws on psychology and Eastern and Western philosophy and that intuition is not well understood. Four interrelated principles of creative intuition are presented. These are;

It involves a state of expanded consciousness
It is an open, fluid way of being
It focuses on the particular, rather than the general
It is an act of fusion or identification which occurs through emotion or empathy

Intuitive Threads - Thoughts on my Creative Process

August 14, 2023

Here is an update on how my weaving for my Intuitive Threads project has been progressing. Since my first piece that I wrote about in my last blog, I’ve woven three more pieces and continued to try out techniques, materials and colours. I’m not going to focus on the technical stuff in this post, I want to talk about the emotional and mental aspects of the creative process that have come up for me recently.

DIFFICULT SECOND, THIRD AND FOURTH WOVEN PIECES

In my last blog I mentioned something I referred to as ‘the difficult second album’, that musicians often suffer with when under pressure to follow up the initial successful album. Can they recreate the conditions and the magic that made the first one successful? Can they perform under the pressure that wasn’t there when they were still unknown and had less external pressures on them to succeed?

Well now I’ve put it like that, I feel like I’m over exaggerating my weaving situation here, but certainly I felt something similar, if on a smaller stakes scale. I was really pleased with the first woven piece I created on my Saori loom. I felt free to experiment and follow through with the process I found myself in and was pleasantly surprised with the result. When it came to the second piece, I felt a pressure, albeit an internal one, to recreate or exceed that original success. So how would I do that? Well by using similar materials, yarns and techniques as before and adding additional techniques I’d learned from the workshops with Amanda at Beautiful Cloth Saori Studio

MOVING THROUGH DISCOMFORT

At first, weaving this second piece felt really uncomfortable. Not surprising considering the pressure I was putting on myself to produce something ‘really good’. I realised I had a background belief that I needed to create a coherent collection. Perhaps this is because in the back of my mind I’ve been thinking I’d like to display these works as an exhibition at some point in the future or it could come from my original textile design training. Maybe it also relates to an underlying belief that I need to have a recognisable style as an artist. A recogonisable style or voice may be something that emerges with time, but it's unreasonable to expect it to show up on my second piece on the loom. Other feelings of discomfort that arose during the second and third pieces were dislike, boredom and impatience. Which brings me to…

STAGES OF PROCESS

I realised I hadn’t been allowing for the different stages and phases of the creative process. After all, we don't all feel the same everyday. There are ebbs and flows; some days we are full of creative intention, inspiration and energy and others, we feel tired or uninspired.

Ten Tips On How To Include Creativity In Your Life When You Have Chronic Illness

July 23, 2020

I believe creativity can be an important part of any healing process but apart from that it is something that can bring joy into and enhance anyone’s life. Having my own experience of chronic illness and knowing how much I’ve personally got out of being creative, I wanted to share some of my more practical tips that I hope will be helpful if you’d like to include more creativity in your life.You don’t have to have an illness to find these tips helpful, but I created them with that in mind.

How Creativity Helped me with Chronic Illness

July 17, 2020

In 2015 I got the shingles virus, initially I didn't feel that ill, I was on summer holiday from work as I worked term time in education. Feeling a bit wobbly I returned to work in September thinking I’d be OK as signs of the infection had healed. Over the following months up to Christmas my health and physical energy became worse, but I kept on pushing myself and trying to ignore how I was feeling until my health completely crashed. I had no physical energy, brain fog, I couldn’t think, it took massive energy to talk, I had dizziness, I could hardly stand or walk for any length of time, I appeared extremely withdrawn. It was like my life or at least my health had come to a big full stop.