A World with Art at the Center
About two years ago, I decided that I wanted a world with art at the center, woven into how we meet all our basic human needs—from food, shelter, and clothing to problem solving, healing, care of the environment, and togetherness. I decided to work toward creating that world. I didn’t know how to begin, so I decided to start by putting art in the center of my own life.
As a first step, I challenged myself to complete a small artwork each day for a year without purchasing any new materials, and to share my daily creations online.
I chose this structure because of the following:
- Without time for fuss or doubt, I suspected it would help free me from distresses interfering with the joy of making art.
- Depleting my supplies and having to innovate by making art from trash seemed fun and liberating.
- I liked the idea that my creativity could have a positive environmental impact and that I might inspire others in the same direction.
WHAT HAPPENED
Within a few days, I was struggling. I kept making art and took the struggle to Co-Counseling sessions.
I made an average of one artwork each day for fifteen months. Some pieces took ten minutes, some two hours.
I did not use up my art supplies, but I started making art from trash anyway.
When I posted my art online, I also shared captions, short essays, and poems reflecting my insights. In this way, one daily artwork became two daily artworks.
My audience grew and engaged with each other and my posts in re-emergent ways, including by sharing their discharge and re-evaluations, their own art, and stories of bonding with family members young and old. (One friend told me that sharing my daily art with his mother every day as she neared the end of her life was a bright point of their visits and inspired her to tell stories about her life that he had never heard.)
WHAT I HAD TO DISCHARGE
When I started, I wanted my art to be impressive, tackling important topics with great skill. This approach left me bored and overwhelmed.
In sessions, I looked at the belief that my art had to be significant or else I should be doing more important things with my time (like chores, earning money, or helping others). I discharged on putting not just art but myself in the center of my life and on the hurts that had led me to give up on that. It took courage (and yet more discharge) to decide to make things just for fun.
Soon I was eagerly making pasted paper collages of clothing, and women’s bodies in clothing. I was embarrassed and confused by this fascination, and I worried about indulging it. In sessions, the feelings gave way to discharge about how unworthy I’d felt as a girl looking at fashion magazines, and how avoiding scrutiny of my female body and pressures to dress in restrictive, “feminine,” always-new-looking clothing had limited my life.
I researched textiles and fashion and soon was discharging about environmental degradation, exploitation of garment workers, racism, and sexism in the fashion industry, and also about humanity figuring out so many beautiful and ingenious ways to make, shape, and repair cloth.
I cried about individual women who had inspired my art, and their brave and creative choices in how they had dressed.
When a friend who liked my project gave me a swatch of wrapping paper printed to look like fur, I hesitated to use it until I brought this “fur” to a session and discharged about animals being killed to decorate human bodies. I cried about women of my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations for whom wearing a fur coat purchased for them by a man was one of the few ways available to publicly declare that they mattered.
After about six months of this, my daily art (and the sessions I had as a result) turned to other topics.
I’ve since gathered my images and writings into a book called Sustainable Fashion: Scrap Paper Stylings for Strong Women and a Healthy Planet that I’m sharing as an electronic book and also a printed book produced in small batches. Half of the proceeds are a fundraiser for organizations fighting for an end to unsustainable, exploitative practices in the fashion industry. The other half I’m keeping, to encourage and enable me to make more art.
WHAT I LEARNED
Here is some of what I learned:
Art making is both a form of play and (like all forms of play) an arena for wrestling with big ideas.
You don’t always have to know which big ideas you’ll tackle. All you need is the intention to move toward joy, healing, and connection and to follow and trust your own mind.
While the professional artist’s vision is limited, edited, and exploited by capitalism, the rest of us who also feel a rational need for creative expression are pushed and hurt into trying to fill that need in the role of consumer.
In the marketplace, classism, racism, sexism, size-ism, age oppression, “mental health” oppression, and other oppressions are reinforced, while artistry—richness, complexity, specificity, diversity—is removed in the name of higher profit margins.
Because of the exploitative system, our personal preferences, practical needs, and deepest values may not be represented. Those who try to meet human needs without destroying the planet in the process—professional artists, workers, and consumers alike—struggle to do so. The fashion industry is a perfect example of this.
In a world where art replaces exploitation—art as play; as celebration; as tribute to the inherent beauty, complexity, and interconnectedness of all life; as exploration of possibilities; as invitation to emotional expression; and as contradiction to distress recordings— there will be room for everyone to express themselves creatively and to explore, savor, and embrace diversity.
Patterns of greed and consumerism can’t possibly withstand the contradiction of real access to and support for creative expression, connection, and care for all life.
A world without art impoverishes us all.
A world with art at its center challenges exploitation and oppressions of all kinds.
A life with art at its center helps heal the damages of past hurts.
Art is activism. (It makes a world with more art.)
Chaplin, Connecticut, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders in the care of the environment
(Present Time 201, October 2020)