Prompt Five - ISR for Katie

What stays with

What has stayed with me from the workshop is the playfulness and responsibility of personal freedom and professional identity, and what this means in a regional setting.
And balance. How we find balance of these selves.

Prompt Five - What stays with you

The prompt for this week, (as I continue to work through the data from Workshop Two and come back to you for some feedback) is really about what stays with you from the workshop.

Any reflections or thoughts, artworks, representation, words or poetic forming... a response in any form (or forms) that you choose.

In the meantime, I would like to share with you something that I produced on how the project is unfolding for me. I did this as part of my presentation for my proposal submission and then recreated it again at home so that I could capture it in the form of a little time-lapse movie.

Rest assured, the answer is there.

GRAT/MIECAT - Group Workshop Two

Last Saturday saw us come together as a group for our second workshop and it was so lovely to catch up with everyone again and get into more arts processes. Different from last time, we started with individual representations then moved through a process of description, collecting keywords, clustering and using the titles as access points to amplify into a group representation of the project!

Phew! No wonder we were all feeling so full by the end of the day.

The hope was to land at a decision around the final end of year group project, and whilst we created and collected a LOT of data and the discussions were rich at the end of the day, many ideas were circling around the room, but not ready to land.

Kim agreed, it was better to let things settle and see what emerged, rather than force some resolution.

Someone asks since "It’s coming out of us, are you able to suggest back to us from what we have come up with today... to come back to group with suggestions? (that have come from you)"

Other key phrases from the end of the session included...
You’ve been well informed
We have got to a place for pause...
Realistically - the next couple of weeks to land
Encapsulating what is ripe and alive. So close
Something will hopefully come
With more information from here
I trust you completely - feel like it’s in good hands
Don't feel the need to be too careful with us

Grab it and run...

And so, as it continues to settle, and I work towards new knowing and endeavour to come back to you all with some more clarity and suggestions, here are some photos of the day...

 

ISR for all following Workshop Two

Prompt Four - ISR for Kay

Prompt - Collaboration - Kay

Collaboration for me is like this image, we all bring elements of ourselves and we need to see how we can integrate and blend our contributions for the good of all.  My process is often quite individual and sometimes it is hard to blend my ideas, but there is something in the process that softens my ideas and builds into a new thing that I could not offer on my own.  It can be painful to collaborate and let go your own ways of doing things but to stay with the process and allow it to evolve and to build up the community leads to a rich and vibrant collaboration where all voices are heard and valued.

The thread was the last element to be added to this art piece.  It was important to me as it suggested to me that all stages are connected, the process moves to a place chaos, to a place of completeness and satisfaction for a collaboration to have a meaningful outcome for all (despite the various interpretations of what it is that we have ended up with). 

Prompt Four - ISR for Natalya

Collaboration

I write a list of all the different collaborations I am involved with at present, but there are too many words...about work, family, professional practice, health care, community...I press delete and start again.

In my working life I have worked on many, many collaborative projects in my creative arts practice, community arts practice and creative arts therapy practice.

I have found collaboration to be: challenging, cumbersome, frustrating, hard to show up, hard to time manage.

It's a dance navigating and negotiating different priorities and expectations.

It can also be rich, diverse, empowering and very useful in getting a job done, cultivating different ideas, sharing workloads, getting different perspectives and drawing upon a variety of skills.

Extra resources, extra skills, extra knowledge, inter-relational, dialogue, problem-solving.

To share interests, responsibilities, possibilities, to reflect, mirror, support, create togetherness.

For this prompt I decide to explore the theme at home with my daughter, as an extension of what I did with her for the last prompt.

After the shared experience of art making I reflect:

Collaboration is a dance.

I yield, I push.

I retreat, I allow,

I assert, I give in and let go.

I am aware that I have separate values & needs in this collaboration.

In the space between

the process leads our dance.

The ebb & flow of energy,

vulnerability, excitement & curiosity.

 Trust in the self & other.

I play with the images we created together exploring the different tensions and celebrations of the experience of collaboration.

Prompt Four - ISR for Janice

Collaboration

Collaboration for me involves sharing, purpose, intention and seeking unity in an unfolding vision. I think I am longing for more fulfilled collaboration particularly in my creative projects and career interests. Sometimes I feel I collaborate more with unseen forces than I do with any particular group or person. I work hard and usually alone but interact with friends, work clients, family, school community, gardeners and spiritual connections and the dog! Life flashes by like looking from a speeding train's window. Nothing stays very long in the images....it's gone.
Simple joys and treasures in the garden hold value and heart. Collaborating with the neighbours sending tomatoes, parsley, plums and apples over the fence and receiving eggs, peaches, carrots and strawberries back!! What a beautiful gift. Sharing gardening tips, tools and weather information....a caring collaboration.

Janice, you are driven mad by technology and need to collaborate with someone on upskilling and gaining a way of getting yourself out there with all your writing and creativity. Don't let the dinosaur stop you....go for the angelic help and the miracle of divine timing, effortless freedom and acceptance of now.