A feather found and sketched with watercolour into my journal.

Does anyone else find reality hard to grasp sometimes? For most of us we live life in a certain manner until some life changing experience happens such as the death of our parents. Then the reality we took for granted is gone. What do we do then? The theorists tell us that we make our our meanings, some of us do not do that until we have to and then we have to make our own reality. For some this is easy they have set their lives up so well that it just keeps going, for others it takes some adjustment and critical reflection, whether we like it or not.

For most people life is hap-hazard, we make it up as we go. We do our best to do what is right. I remember my mother saying to me when I had my son ‘you do your best and after that you can do no more’. A friend recently told me that feathers hold a special meaning for her, so now when I see them I pick them up and try to find time to paint them. Why? It makes me feel connected to her and her life. I paint and make to feel alive, to feel real

I believe in the power of the arts to heal and aid in reflection and this helps us to make new meanings in life, to make sense of things, maybe even help us to understand ourselves a bit? We can find making things helps us to reflect on and put things in perspective. On a very simple basic level we learn that we ‘can do’ things that we did not realise we could. We can regain a sense of being human and just being and making. We get back to simple basics, whether we do it communally or alone, there is a great satisfaction in starting a piece of art or craft from the very beginning, designing it and making something that is exclusively yours. It is both liberating and scary because we do invest a lot in these things and we have to learn that they do not always turn out exactly as we expected, quite often they are even better. Sometimes they have to be done again as it did not work but perseverance will bring an item of great personal value.

In this world of intended learning outcomes it is very hard to be truly creative. We can all follow a pattern and make a specific item, but what about putting ourselves into the work, take a leap into the unknown, have an unintended outcome…that is creativity.

Failure in the creative process is not the end but a very important part of the process and not something to be afraid of, it is often the start of true creativity. If you are totally in control of what you are doing how can it be creative?

This piece is a piece in the middle of the creative process, the negative image was done in 1979 and has been printed onto cotton using the process of cyanotype. Watch this space!