Productivity and Creative Practice: Making Meaning podcast Episode 44

This blog and podcast are again from my Cultures of Care Group and in a change to the usual, the podcast includes the group discussion as well as my talk, which is my reflections on productivity as an artist and what that means to me now as a research-based artist more than a maker of things. I talk about making and doing what you want to do is a self-care practice and that my creativity is more than my productivity in a traditional sense. The conversation then ranges  across the nature of unfinished creative work, open-ended explorations without fixed outcomes, about our relationships to the things we own and what counts as a product, anyway.

You can read my talk at the end of this post if you prefer, and you can find a transcript of the whole podcast below if you want to read rather than listen.

We talk at the end about the importance of textile making as a community activity, which actually leads perfectly into the next Cultures of Care Group sessions in October and November which focus on textiles and care. The recordings of those sessions won’t be edited together into a podcast until the new year for series 5, so if you want to take an part in the discussions, please book in for the live sessions which are as follows: Thursday 24th October 2024, 11am and Thursday 28th November 2024, 10am. I know that time of day won’t suit everyone, particularly outside Europe, but if you book a free ticket, you can watch the recording of the live event shortly afterwards, rather than wait for the podcast. Tickets are free  and it’s a lovely, welcoming, relaxed discussion, so I hope you can join me. 

Play here

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Download the full transcript here

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Productivity and Creative Practice

Over the last few years, my creative projects have been about criminals, about genetics, about grief and loss, about quilts and history and museums. I loved all of those themes, I found many stories to tell and so many objects to make. But they were all indoors. I love my studio, working in museums and archives but I love being outdoors. Whenever the weather isn’t awful, I get torn between wanting to be in my studio and wanting to be outside. 

It’s been there for a long time, this need to be outdoors more, to connect nature and my work more closely. I tried, years ago. I tracked my walks on GPS to do something visual with but it was too techy for me and I didn’t go any further. I made a few artworks with plant parts like ash keys. I made a sketchbook of my walks in my local urban edge lands in Leicester. I booked a retreat in a cottage on a cliff in Cornwall to walk and to work, to figure out this conundrum of the outdoors in my head and how to make it into my studio. I spent 2 days deep in thought across those cliff tops and sitting on beaches. I realised that the connection I wanted to explore was with my local landscape, the hills and fields and woodlands and granite outcrops and quarries and hedges, not the wild coasts of Cornwall. That was wonderful, but it wasn’t my creative space. It wasn’t my homeland. In the end I concluded that I had enough projects to do already and I didn’t need to turn my love of walking into my work as well. That could just be walking. Not everything has to turn into artwork, not everything has to be an inspiration to make and create. Walking could just be. I could just be. 

That was seven years ago. I let go of the idea that walking could be part of my creative practice. It was just my escape from the city, from the confines of my inner-city home. That only became more stark in lockdown, with the extended local lockdowns that Leicester was hemmed in by when the rest of the country got to go on summer holidays. I found the city confines suffocating. My urban edge lands which I had so enjoyed when I could ramble amongst them out of choice now felt like the grim, dirty, post-industrial wastelands that they are. Last week I was on a residency with my artist friend Gillian McFarland. We spent five days together talking, thinking, walking, experimenting, throwing ideas around, drawing and writing. I had a wonderful time and felt really refreshed and inspired. Then I came home and I started feeling regret that I hadn’t got anything to show for this week and I hadn’t made anything. Except of course I did, I just didn’t finish the week with a textile artwork (I didn’t even take textiles with me) or half a book written even though neither of those things was the point of the week. The point of the week was to be unfocused, imaginative and inspired by the wonderful creative mind of my collaborator. I absolutely achieved that, but still ended up feeling that I could have done more or that we need to have something to show for our week together. I know that feeling is not how I want to feel about our week and that we actually did plenty. We made a collaborative paper-based artwork and we made a lot of process-based work and more ideas that I know what to do with. I also wrote pages and pages in my journal and figured out some things that have been unresolved for years. It was actually a really productive time, just not in the kind of way I can easily show to people and say “we did this”. 

Before I went, I wrote the first set of notes for this talk, about the trap of feeling we have to be productive and how that’s not what creative practice should be. And then I fell straight into the trap! Luckily, I know the way out of this trap and reflecting on the week just now has reminded me of just how much thinking got done and that thinking is my creative practice. 

Many of you will have felt the despondency when someone engages with your creative work and then asks “what is it for?” Those of us that make non-functional things, artwork that isn’t easily categorised as a painting or a sculpture, hear this all the time. Our society has got so wrapped up in the capitalist idea that the only kind of useful and beneficial is financial or practical that we forget that creativity is of enormous value in itself. 

You might have also heard, or said, the plaintive words “what can I do with it?” in a workshop or class. Textile makers love learning new techniques, exploring ideas and simply being creative, but so many seem to be deeply uncomfortable (or are made to feel uncomfortable) with this “unproductive” way of using their time. Their justification, internally, or maybe externally, is to make a decorative and expressive textile artwork into a cushion, bag or add it to a quilt or other useable item, rather than just let it exist in its own right. Why can’t this piece of appliqué, embroidery, print or weave just be what it is – an exploration of ideas, an experiment, a learning process and a joy. We have become so squashed by capitalism that we feel we have to justify our creative impulses and our need to express ourselves through making with our hands and hearts by making something useful. So often makers, women makers, feel guilt for spending their time doing something they love. It makes me rage. Productivity isn’t the purpose of our existence. We don’t need more stuff. Productivity isn’t the purpose of creativity and imagination. No one should feel that they have to turn their hobby into a money-making venture, but many do. 

Other hobbies and pursuits are allowed to be purely for wellbeing and enjoyment but craft, particularly textiles, has its value and purposes questioned so much. A stroll in the woods doesn’t have to prove its own value. We know that it’s good for us to be moving, and be outside, just as really we know, we really know, those who make, that making, creative expression is good for us too. It’s good for us whether we make something useful or not. It’s the process, not the product that is the purpose of creativity. It’s great to make something useful, I love beautiful and functional things a lot, but that doesn’t mean that making something non-functional is bad. It’s not, it’s a wonderful thing, open-ended and exploratory where you don’t have to follow rules or a pattern. I’ve realised, after teaching textiles and other things for the best part of 20 years that not everyone likes working without a pattern, without an outcome in mind. I didn’t in the early part of my career, either. I made products because that had a structure that I could get my head around. Eventually though, as my confidence and creativity developed, I found I preferred making with meaning, rather than making for functionality. It’s through teaching and constantly saying “it doesn’t have to be for anything” or “it’s whatever you want it to be” that I really absorbed this into my own creative practice. I’ve been saying for about 10 years now that I am all about the process not the product, about the practice of creativity not the output. I don’t make all that much, but I am creative all the time. Once we accept and really embrace the fact that creativity, self-expression, joy and the connection that comes with creative practice, the more we can accept that creativity is inherently valuable. This isn’t just about personal fulfilment and wellbeing, creativity in and of itself is good for everyone, it is good for society and humanity as a whole. Isn’t that what creative workshops are really about? The connection, conversation, shared experiences, inspiration and feeling of all being well with the world are all enormously valuable. It’s the same when we make alone though, too. Making, expressing ourselves through our hands, is connecting us to other makers, other women, usually. Women have connected and collaborated through textile production for thousands of years and I really feel that we continue that thread when we make, we continue that conversation through making, sharing, understanding of each other through what we make. Making with meaning gives me a deep sense of connection to the wider world, even if I am making alone. It also gives me a deep sense of wellbeing and that is enormously valuable. 

For most of us though, we make for the joy of it – the feeling of cloth or of clay in our hands, the slowness and the sensory immersion in our materials, the space to reflect and consider, to be calm and quiet with our hands – soothing our over-stressed nervous systems. We can express our ideas, make our thoughts material, work through our emotions and connect with people and planet. You wouldn’t be here, right now, if you didn’t either know the deep happiness of creativity or the connection and enlightenment of experiencing someone else’s creativity made manifest through an artwork. 

Making something functional is just as rewarding to many, I’m not dismissing the functional object, but what I am doing is creating a manifesto for the process of creativity being what matters, not what is made. 

I’ve been making professionally for almost 20 years. I’ve been all around the various expressions of being a textile maker; a product designer-maker, a clothing designer, a dressmaker and an artist. I’ve made and designed for myself and for others, for books and patterns and for countless workshops and courses. I’ve moved now from being a maker of things to a maker of ideas, a researcher and explorer. That’s my path, but it’s not the only path, it’s just the only path for me now. I’m not the kind of maker who needs to be making all the time, for whom their wellbeing is entirely tied up with their hands being at work. I need to be creative, imaginative, free to explore and investigate and able to connect with others, share my thinking and reflections. I don’t actually make all that much now, and that is ok. 

Pre-pandemic I created five solo exhibitions in not much more than 5 years. Since then I have slowed down almost to a crawl, in terms of textile artwork production. I may not be stitching so much but my creative brain is more active than ever and I have allowed space for writing, reflecting, sharing and connection as well as pure hands-on making. This summer I have hardly touched needle and thread as my Cultures of Care project has moved more towards nature-based working which is very much process-driven and not about making things I will keep. I’ve made nests from leaves, drawn with clay straight from the ground and made things with seed pods and leaves. This is very hands-on but about as non-functional as can be – most of what I’ve made has gone on the compost heap, and that’s ok, I don’t have to have work to show for my time to prove my value as an artist. 

In my other major project, I am working in the way I used to before I became an artist – I am curating an exhibition. I’ve been visiting museum stores and archives, reading books and investigating object-based mysteries, forming theories and developing ideas for how to express them in interactive and engaging ways. I will also be making artwork in response to the research work I’ve been doing too, a combination that is so tailor-made for me that anyone would think I devised it all myself (which I did!). This is a related but different expression of my creativity, which will have material form in the end, but the development of it, the ideas work is not about the end product. 

These Cultures of Care group conversations and later blogs and podcasts have been a huge part of my creativity recently – things that are arguably more productive than just allowing thoughts to ramble around in my own head. These amazing, nourishing conversations fill my creative cup too – not in the same way as making with my hands, but they are equally beneficial. I know now that I don’t have to be churning out artwork to prove that I am an artist. I am an artist in all the things that I do, all the things that I am, not just in my studio. My worth is not measured by my textile output. My textile output does not need to be functional to be valued. I do not have to be selling work to count as a professional artist. I do not have to hold an exhibition at the end of this project to prove that I have been busy and done something useful with the public funding. I create work all the time, just don’t present that creative work in ways that the general public might understand as artist practice. For me, right now, being an artist is exactly that, being, not always doing. 

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