Acknowledging my inspirations

As an academic, it is important to me to acknowledge my sources for the work I produce. The Creative Process Meditations grew from my long-term engagement with a number of different inspirations, including both people and communities. My hope is that through sharing these sources, others can also be inspired.

The initial image+scribbles format arose as inspiration from the Instagram account ArtPedagogy. I liked the rough, immediate approach to the teachings, thoughts, manifestos and how the highly visual way of communicating important and deep topics got me hooked quickly. I combined this with thinking around ethics, spurred on from my professional role in ethics at the time, coupled with an assignment for my photography course at the Open College of the Arts on addressing the statement 'photography is simple'. In seeking to challenge the idea of photography as 'simple', I came across the wonderful resources at the Photography Ethics Centre which sparked my own thinking around the myriad ways that ethics makes its way in to photography and broader art practice.

Developing an integrated creative and body focused approach was something I first discovered as part of the online global community Rooted, where I was further introduced to the work of Dr Resmaa Menakem through his book My Grandmother's Hands. The Rooted community and Resmaa's work uses somatics (movement studies and bodywork) to foster connection to self, other and community, and has influenced much of the way I consider my approach to situations through 'being' in my own body.

Moving into some of the more specific activities I have used in the 'meditations', the first time I came across the practice of placing written ideas in a circle and 'greeting' each of them to explore how they feel was with arts psychotherapist Dr Allison Singer. Finally, the question 'if your drawing could speak, what would it say' is a question I first heard used as part of the Tamalpa Life/Art process through Tamalpa UK.