Everyone Got Inspired!
We’ve just completed our first very successful SPARKS FLY Creativity Training Workshop. It was wonderful to watch the participants find their unique creative voices, and find them they did. Some discovered talents they never knew they had, some honed skills they had merely danced around and others found the validation to embrace the gifts they suspected they had, but could not commit to.
Key to determining their gifts was the exploration of both their sensory perception and their cognitive processing of the world, through a series of exercises. The exercises went well beyond the five common senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, to delve into lesser-known ones. There is discussion as to how many senses humans actually have and while there is some overlap between them, varying methods of neurological classification can reveal as many as 21 senses.
Hester Schofield led the participants through curated exercises which included painting, drawing, paying attention to the natural world, meditation, and vocalizing, probably to the amusement of local Lunenburg residents who may have witnessed them seaside. A sunset sail on the Eastern Star provided much inspiration.
Seeing the World with Creativity
Paints, inks, crayons, markers, pastels and pencils were used; string was cut and dipped in ink; paper was crinkled and decorated and glued; taste and touch were explored; notebooks were filled with images.
Participants embraced stream-of-consciousness writing with no self-editing and no self-judgement, just the putting down of thoughts and observations in their notebooks. A canvas of easel paper lent itself to diagrams and swirls and symbols. Ultimately, this workshop was a safe space for them to work through their self-imposed limitations, the ‘I can’t do it’ that we all critique ourselves with.
Having shared their amazing final projects and supporting others to share theirs, participants walked away with the confidence to produce creative work, calling the workshop transformative.
