Everyday Creativity in Culture Box
The team recently took part in the Everyday Creativity conference at the University of Brighton (13th June).
We presented a paper entitled “Everyday Creativity in Culture Box: Using remote and digital creative activities to promote social inclusion during the pandemic”. The presentation was delivered in the afternoon by Dr Chloe Asker.
The presentation can be viewed below:
Reflections on the conference (Chloe)
Experiences
I arrived at the University of Brighton’s Falmer campus on a gloriously sunny June morning, excited to attend my first in-person conference since the pandemic. Whilst registering, there was a sense of collective anticipation and excitement for the day to come - everyone was eager to network and have conversations (something that has been lost through online conferencing platforms). I met some wonderful, dedicated, and passionate practitioners, policy makers, and academics during the day. There was palpable excitement over the concept of everyday creativity (it being the first international conference on the subject) and the role that the arts can have in health and wellbeing outcomes.
On behalf of the project team, I presented a the paper in the video above which was well received and was enhanced by a subsequent paper from the Public Health team in East Sussex. They presented their project Everyday Creativity with CultureShift, which used creative activities to support health and wellbeing of diverse groups during the pandemic. More can be read about the project here.
The conference was creative in its content and format. In the opening session there was a poetry performance from Dr Helen Johnson (the convenor of the conference) and a music making workshop using kitchen utensils. Both of these moments set the tone for the rest of the day. In the first session I went to, the presenters spoke about their decolonisation activities and process in the medical school at the University of Sussex, drawing on creative methods such as comics, song writing and performing, and poetry. The second session I attended was from an artist and poet who performed her poetry, inviting us to blow bubbles every time she said the word ‘time’. Also in this session was an artist and PhD student who led a workshop on neurodiversity (primarily dyslexia) in academia. We explored art journalling as an academic methodology and self-care practice through creating our own zine. Other presentations invited us to make alongside listening, with a textile artist attending the conference and embroidering key words into a cardigan.
The conference allowed us to explore everyday creativity in multiple ways, from the cognitive, visual, and ocular ways of doing academia through powerpoint presentations and oral communication methods to the embodied, tactile, multi-sensorial experiences of making, drawing, blowing bubbles, listening to music and poetry, and playing kitchen utensils. This mixture of approaches created a gentle and inclusive atmosphere for the delegates, and as someone who lives with neurodiversity, the standard academic conference can often provoke burn-out or fatigue. But instead, this conference provided a sense of inspiration, energy, and excitement.
Theoretical reflections
The conference drew on many different conceptualisations and understandings of everyday creativity, including: “little-c” creativity, arts-based interventions, creative methodologies, arts approaches to public health, and performance (to name a few).
The conference concluded with a reflection on the “continuum of creativity”. This continuum forges a path for an academic engagement with creativity that does not emphasise the dichotomies between elite/everyday, but instead recognises all forms of creativity and creative practice as being on this spectrum.
In the next two sections, I am going to draw on literature to think through creative improvisation through Hallam and Ingold’s vernacular creativity, and use Bellass et al.’s (2019) work to consider everyday creativity in Culture Box.
Vernacular creativity
From my own research, “vernacular creativity” (Hallam and Ingold, 2008) was central to my Masters thesis. Hallam and Ingold (2008) define creativity as improvisation:
To improvise is to follow the ways of the world, as they open up, rather than to recover a chain of connections, from an end-point to a starting-point, on a route already travelled.’ (Ingold, 2009, p. 97)
Creative improvisation has several dimensions:
Generative
It involves elements coming together through assembling, mixing, and throwing-together. Here, a work of art is a ‘thing’ rather than an object, joining with and following the forces and flows of the material that bring the form of work into being.
Relational
Creativity mingles with the world, in that “the mind’s creativity is inseparable from that of the total matrix of relations in which it is embedded and into which it extends, and whose unfolding is constitutive of the process of social life.’ (Hallam and Ingold, 2008, p. 9)
Temporal
Creativity involves various speeds and paces. When drawing, for example, through the motion of the hand-on-the-pen, there are short, intense periods of work, where the colour is traced from the pencil to the paper surface. These are followed by spacings and gaps, where generative, relational improvisation occurs.
The “way we work”
Here, creativity is the ultimate quality of life in which we understand life to be unscriptable, there being multiple potentialities at any one moment.
Everyday creativity
In Culture Box we are thinking with and through Bellass et al.’s (2019) conceptualisation of everyday creativity (EC). In their work, they speak about the ‘little-c’ creativity, those ordinary everyday creative practices that involve imagination, improvisation and inventive problem-solving. These acts form a part of navigating everyday life.
Culture Box, is focused on the notion of ‘art as activity’, in that it sought to improve relational outcomes and promote social inclusion, relationship and community building during an isolating and challenging pandemic.
Bellass et al. (2019) develop a critical approach to EC in dementia research. They draw on 6 dimensions:
Everyday life and creativity
Power relations and creativity
Operationalising everyday creativity
Affective ambivalence
Difference
Reciprocality
These are dimensions are explored and added to in our conceptualisation of everyday creativity in Culture Box. Below you can see the framework for everyday creativity in Culture Box:
In the spirit of EC, we have focused on the ‘mundane’ forms of creativity that emerged in the everyday lives of the participants who undertook the project. As part of this, we became immersed in the stories of the participants who took part in multiple time series interviews. Some of these stories are on our blog.
Participant story 1: Georgia and Joy
Reflections
In concluding session of the conference, the panelists spoke about the need for a level of criticality when it comes to the role that the arts play in health and wellbeing outcomes, in that they cautioned against panacea thinking when approaching arts & health. This is something that was pertinent in the Culture Box presentation, as we included instances of ‘affective ambivalence’ from the participants - particularly feelings of being infantilised or that the activities did not meet their capacities.
A lesson that we learnt from exploring EC in Culture Box was the need for an approach that respects the interests, capacities, and agencies of people with dementia when involving them in creative activities. We aimed to do this through the participatory approach that the project took, and were somewhat successful with this. But, it’s important to acknowledge where the gaps were and how we can learn from them in the future.