‘Everyone can make art, but I think that most people forget.’ (Damien Hirst quoted in The Daily Telegraph, 4 May 2020)
When I was a child and then a teenager, I used to make a lot of things: cross stitch birthday and Christmas cards, American block patchwork cushions and quilts and embroidered cushions and hangings. Most were gifts, deeply personal ways of saying ‘I love you’. My mother still has many of them, now rather frayed and discoloured but still loved.
But I grew up. My time was absorbed by studying for a degree and professional qualifications, by making my way in a competitive world, by the business of being a grown up. I had put away childish things and instead I became a regular visitor to museums and frequent attender at several theatres: a consumer not a producer.
Then two summers ago, at the end of the first year of a two-year post-graduate degree, I had a bad fall and ended up in hospital. I went from being over committed and over-stretched but enjoying every minute of it to being stuck in a chair with limited mobility for several months. No more studying and business travel for me. With much regret, I had to defer my degree, but I was determined to keep studying somehow.
As regular readers of this blog know my degree was and is in creativity and innovation, so I decided to try out some of the creative activities I had given up decades earlier. I experimented with several different study days/weekends but two were, in that overused expression, ‘transformative’.
Saori free weaving at the London Loom.
Experimental book making with Shelagh McCarthy at the British Library.
For the first time in decades I had found a new way to think, to make sense of myself, of the world and of the problems I was working with others to solve, all through making.
I am sure that many people who work in the arts and read this blog are currently thinking ‘Well, duh..’ but I invite you think of the fish in the parable who, when asked by an older fish ‘How’s the water?’ ask themselves ‘What the hell is water?’. In the perplexing times we are living through and the tough times we are facing, making sense through making could be one way for us to help ourselves and the communities we serve. I often read of the transformative power of the arts – I find myself wondering how often we really mean it.
Susan