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The Metro is a strange mix of serious reporting and silly fluff stories, although a few years ago, it veered more towards fluff. For example, for a few months in 2008, you could be guaranteed that there would be at least one article a week detailing Something That Looks Like Something Else.

It was almost as if an editorial assistant had been given free rein to indulge a peculiar personal obsession.
These articles never failed to make me chuckle, and of course being the complete nerd that I am, I started cutting out and collecting them. Below are a few examples:

I’ve always had a huge affection for creaky old Victorian museums. One of my favourite places to visit as a child was Dublin’s Natural History Museum (also known as the ‘Dead Zoo’), and I spent many an hour there wandering through its two labyrinthian floors of taxidermy. I recommend a visit whenever in Dublin.

The Natural History Museum, Dublin

The Horniman Museum also has a Natural History section, and one that threw up a few surprises for me.

I am stupidly soppy and sentimental about dogs, so I was quite taken aback by this somewhat disturbing vitrine containing the taxidermic heads of a number of domesticated dogs.  I can’t help but be amused by the Victorian lack of sentimentality that results in the display of severed pet heads in a family orientated museum….

And of course, the poor ol’ Dodo:

Another find that I was particularly interested in was the Haitian Voodoo Altar.

Vodou (Anglicised to Voodoo) seems to be a religion that amalgamates many different religious traditions, including the beliefs and practices of West African peoples, and Roman Catholic Christianity. Vodou was created by African slaves who were brought to Haiti in the 16th century and still followed their traditional African beliefs, but were forced to convert to the religion of their slavers

The altar acts as “the place where the living and the dead, the human and the divine, meet and communicate”

What was striking to me about the altar was the extraordinary mix of mysticism and kitsch. The poverty of the people compelled them to construct the altar from found objects , and imbue these objects with symbolic importance. Hence the beaded and sequinned whiskey bottles, plastic skulls, doll parts and brightly coloured fabrics. The use of dolls was especially intriguing, and to Western eyes gives the appearance of malevolence, and might contribute to Voodoo’s sinister reputation, a reputation that appears underserved. This from Wikipedia:

There is a practice in Haiti of nailing crude poppets with a discarded shoe on trees near the cemetery to act as messengers to the otherworld, which is very different in function from how poppets are portrayed as being used by vodou worshippers in popular media and imagination, i.e. for purposes of sympathetic magic towards another person. Another use of dolls in authentic Vodou practice is the incorporation of plastic doll babies in altars and objects used to represent or honor the spirits.

Voodoo Altar

Voodoo Altar

The Horniman Museum has an wonderful collection of masks from around the world.

My favourite is this one made of red abrus seeds, made by the Agras People of Northern Nigeria in the mid-twentieth century.

Abrus seed mask

Some other things that caught my eye at the museum:

Mask and marionette collection

Tree bark mask

The workshop had a pretty free structure; we were supplied with plentiful scrap fabric and balls of wool to use, and shown a simple technique for making fabric flowers.

I always find children’s energy and imagination really intriguing. Eva found lots of uses for the wool outside of the intended flower-making purposes. The balls of wool were used in a variety of games, alternating as footballs, handbags, hats, and as Eva’s pet dog on a thread leash, which she walked around the room, and at one stage tied the leash to the table leg, to prevent the woolly dog from running away.

As endearing as I found these games, I found myself wanting to impose structure onto Eva’s play. Instead of following Eva’s lead and engaging in these humorous flights of fancy, I almost wanted to control Eva’s creative output, and teach her how to make something ‘properly’.

I was interested in why I was thinking this way, and this led me later to do a bit of research on the nature of children’s creativity, and ways of nurturing it, or ways in which it can be impeded through the imposition of restrictions.

Creativity is essentially a form of problem-solving; one that involves adaptability and flexibility of thought. All the online articles I read encouraged an emphasis on process rather than product. Children should be allowed time to explore materials and possibilities, without hawk-eyed supervision, and adults should adapt to children’s ideas rather than trying to structure the child’s ideas to fit the adult’s.  The aim is to nurture curiousity and encourage the generation of ideas; the emphasis on creating a non-evaluative atmosphere in which children can build self-confidence in their ability for spontaneous creative thinking.

One of the interesting things I read online was that children’s creativity tends to peak at around 4 years old, before socialization pressures, and a desire to conform to peer norms causes this to diminish during school years, and creativity doesn’t reach it’s former peak until college years. This is most likely linked to the school system of evaluating children’s work with grades and rewards. Rewards can act as a barrier to creativity, as emphasis is taken off the process, and a fixation on coming up with ‘the right answer’ takes its place.

I began to wonder how these ideas about creativity related to how I approached my own artistic practice, and how I viewed the creative process.

Although my paintings can at first sight seem quite spontaneous and free, I am constantly trying to tread a careful balance between spontaneity and control. I am always fighting a tendency to overrule my artistic instincts. Like most people, I have an assumption in my mind of what art should look like, and sometimes this can cloud more original thinking.

Some of my best work has been produced when I have loosened my grip, and let go of wanting to control outcomes; trusting the process, and my accumulative knowledge and skill. I don’t mean to imply that thinking is taken out of creativity, more that there is a huge value in simply trusting acquired instincts.

Making art involves making a commitment to explore a process, and this usually involves taking risks and making mistakes. I have found that self-censorship in the creative stages isn’t helpful.

The evaluative criteria on which to judge work are often hard to pin-point. At this stage I have simply chosen to ask the questions ‘is it interesting? Is there a tension within the composition that is engaging?’ If the answer to those questions is ‘yes’ then I deem the work finished. I am sure as my practice develops over time, my priorities for evaluating work will change also.

My main guiding principal is to nurture my own curiousity: to follow this curiousity, and use it to branch out my ideas, and explore my chosen materials and their possibilities, and by doing so explore my own capacity for creativity.