The Promised Garden

Permission to be daft!

Last nights Creative lab session ‘Shape and Colour’ allowed us to spend a couple of hours listening to music, having fun, creating crazy art and even crazier stories to go with them. We connected with each other and gave ourselves permission to be daft. We had such a joyous experience, with laughter and smiles and full of surprises. So what was involved, you may ask? Spontaneous art making to a range of music, story making, playing with words and images that sparked memories and running around our houses finding objects. And the result? creative team work involving a ceramic cauliflower sheep, the portrait of a murderer, a sea witch, a tin of teeth, and a toilet cistern. I kid you not. You couldn’t make it up, but we did exactly that, with joy and laughter. No one had to be a master storyteller or a fine artist but just as a single musical note becomes a symphony when put together with other notes so our creative team found that each persons small contribution added to the whole and made for the most extraordinary and unique creative experience. 

I’m learning that people are much more willing to take a leap of faith and just go-for-it, even though they are scared at first they soon find that they are braver than they think. This is lovely to see and quite surprised me with these sessions. The next session will be more calm and thoughtful but equally spontaneous, creative and engaging. The break out rooms work really well for this type of work and we are constantly finding new ways to present what we have come up with on zoom. I’ve learnt that live art making is lovely to watch, simple words and phrases held up to the screen works well. Getting up on our feet and doing a collective movement exercise is great. I can't wait to see what collective alchemy is ignited from the next Creative Laboratory session in February. So I invite you to come join us next time and give yourself permission to be daft, god knows we need it in these strained and constrained times.