Reigniting Creativity
Dragon embroidery - Victoria and Albert Museum, London
My favourite way to reignite my creativity when I’m in a rut is to go on a journey – sit as a passenger in a car or on a train, tuning out from the world around me and focusing on the quieter, contemplative inner voice. As a child we lived overseas resulting in periodic visits ‘home’ that meant the numbing boredom of plane flights that lasted twenty or so hours, followed by car journeys of a couple of hundred miles to visit relatives, three children tacitly agreeing to ignore each other after the first hour of bickering. You soon learnt to doze, daydreaming in that state just between sleep and waking, to pass the hours lost in your own thoughts. Long journeys still trigger an inwardly focused state of mind, leaving me turning over ideas and mentally walking through the making process, fine tuning designs, challenging some, discarding others.
Active creativity is the sort that involves digging for new inspiration, fresh textures and previously unconsidered areas of artistic expression. Nature is always with us and a constant well spring of ideas and energy, but when I need to jolt out of a rut I dig into the past. Museums are a treasure trove of experiences you could otherwise only hope find through a lifetime of travelling, and even then you could only gather to get a slither of the information on your own compared to the collective knowledge and discoveries of thousands of others before you.
Locally, a trip to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter is my visit of choice, obviously by train to allow me to begin the wind down into that personal, creative state. I’ve already written about some of the treasures of RAMM on this Journal page. For a real feast, though a physically exhausting one, a day at the V&A in London is the ultimate treat – seemingly miles of corridors leading to nuggets of pure genius, a decent lunch enjoyed while cocooned in William Morris’s tea room and all this sandwiched by six hours of train travel. Two for one when it comes to creative environments for me – what’s not to like. The Victorians really did know how to excite and intrigue, though their methods and the items they acquired now need carefully scrutiny and at times an apology, reparation and repatriation.
Other than artistic creativity, in business there is a need for productive, administrative creativity where shit gets done – writing deadlines are met, marketing plans are hatched and accounts finalised and filed. Contemplative states just won’t do it so it’s off to a phone free, caffeine fuelled day at a co-working office table far away from the workshop and it’s ever present distractions. Miraculously, I get a mountain of work done in the effort to appear the professional businesswoman, beavering away under the curious gaze of the other customers, desperately trying not to mutter to myself as I type, feverishly flipping through papers, crossing off tasks. It’s amazing how productive the fear of skin scorching embarrassment can make you.