The creative process is a constant exploration and excavation of what holds meaning for you, and how you might want to be in the world. That’s why you’ll always be asked to creatively represent your experience in my workshops - to give form to an experience using a visual modality. A sketch, a sculpture, a photograph, a body movement, or even a sound.
I’ll admit, it can be an intimidating task.
Who wants to be within an experience for so long? Who wants to question how they do things?
And dealing with all the perfectionist self-talk about what the visual piece ‘should’ look like? Nope!
But, if done with intention and curiosity, the process breeds a rich, multi-dimensional understanding of how you navigate experiences, your choices, patterns, needs and values.
So, I wanted to share with you 3 ways I go about visually expressing an experience.
It’s not a specific, rigid order. These are just some of the ways that work for me. Also, different art modalities can reveal different aspects of your experience, so I always try to utilise multiple forms in my explorations.
TIP: You can save the images below and use these steps whenever you need.
1. Consulting the Body
The first way I try to access an experience, is to get a sense of how an experience or a part of the experience inhabits my body. This can be done by tracking an emotional response or a physical response, and using those as cues to recreate or enact the impact of that experience. Eg. Pulsating. Tightening. Overwhelming. Kick in the gut.
I usually need to take a few minutes for me to become present to what’s coming up for me. It’s also important to go in with a beginner’s mind in meeting the moment, putting aside what I think I might know about this experience.
Once I get a physical or emotional sense of the experience, I can use my body as the modality of expression, like using a hand gesture to recreate a sense of ‘tightening’. Or I can try to interpret that using another medium, such as string.
I wouldn’t recommend this to someone who doesn’t feel safe staying in their body. Instead, I might ask them to work with the senses and external cues. Which brings me to the second way I visually represent an experience.
2. Consulting the Material
We want to get out of our head and feel the pulse to whatever we’re working with.
Sometimes, it’s easier - and safer - for us to do that with tangible material before pulling it into our body and asking it to do the heavy work. Sometimes, our body is simply too depleted, or touched out, to use as a medium of expression. Working the external stimuli can create that distance, a buffer, between our experience and our body.
Working with touch and the external senses and seeing what sparks something in me about the experience. I can go through art materials, or even an object related to my experience. Feeling my way into the experience and once again, approaching it with a beginner’s mind. Seeing what is resonating with my experience e.g. soft & soothing, do I need something with resistance, something heavily textured.
3. Forming As You Go
There are times when I’m not really fully present to what’s happening within myself. Sometimes I’m blank. Sometimes I’m shut off. Sometimes I’m still numb from what happened. And that could already be an indicator of my response to the experience.
In that case I just try to get into it bit by bit, slowly loosening and being guided by what I feel sensorially or emotionally called to do. And the process of making itself can provide cues for you.
I had a participant exploring the roles she takes on in a relationship. She chose a 2 meter-long length of wire. She worked the entire length in silence for twenty minutes. When we spoke she said 'Seeing how it will go. Being patient. Giving it a chance.’ Already, something about how she is in relationships became visible.
Sometimes the visual outcome we create won’t really be like your experience, but it could still serve to get you closer to what it might be - ‘It’s not really this, it’s more like this’ - which is still insight into your experience. Either way, we want to build dialogue between different parts of ourselves and work collaboratively with whatever material you are using to put language to your experience, whether it’s your body or an object. It’s the going back and forth, the checking in that serves us getting closer to better understanding our experience.
Which one would you start with? Let me know in the comments below!