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