All in Resilience
When is it time to wave your own white flag, to surrender to circumstances beyond your control? I’ve been sick all week which has meant a surrendering of sorts, learning from the lessons of letting go and prioritising what is essential. It had me thinking about red flags and white. When and what to fight for and/or when to surrender.
Art activism is my way of maintaining optimism in the face of adversity. So many calamities are happening in the world I often feel overwhelmed and powerless. That’s where small grass roots projects like The Postcard Project – Finding Hope’ is a way I can add my artistic voice to keep hope alive.
Artist books sit outside conventional artwork definitions. They can be 3D or 2D artworks, they can have a traditional book structure or look like a strange sculpture made from a variety of materials including melting ice. One thing they have in common is that they are acts of resistance.
What to do when you are feeling overwhelmed? When your art (and life) are feeling stalled by the chaos of the world and you can’t find your way into creating joyfully. It’s times like this that I reach into my store of visual memories, like the image of bunting strung between the houses in a Mexican village. Colour and movement can provide the spark to keep hope alive.
Creating art can be a tumultuous activity. Often things don’t turn out the way you hoped, or you can get stuck on an idea that doesn’t work. What to do to whether those rough creative seas? Collage is my go-to activity when ‘in-between’ projects.
Liberation comes in many forms. Mine came from tearing up years of my Morning Pages journals and immersing them in a vat of water ready to turn into paper. Not only the start of a new project but also a new way to look at the impermanence of life. That when things feel too hard to bear, “this too shall pass”.
The heart in stress or at rest? When we feel engulfed in chaos, we are challenged to ‘take heart’. On this Australia/Invasion Day in Australia, I am remembering all the protests of the past decades which have resulted in changing government policies or mainstream attitudes. The pictures of my heart remind me of the beating heart of Planet Earth, connecting us all on our one world.
Finding ways to personally connect your art with the public and activate art conversations can consume a lot of an artist’s time. But making art and culture accessible can be as simple as creating a pop up art event, staging an artisan market or taking your art to the streets. Have art, will travel.
When systems fall into chaos, it’s time to get creative and start imaginative mapping. Creating a visual representation of how you want life to look helps bring that future into reality. Chaos and entropy are natural parts of systems under pressure and from them can emerge new order and stability. Hold that thought!!!
