At work
My favorite creation!
I've always rejected different exercises for cultivating creativity and new creative perspectives, but this made it clear that playing around a bit can be necessary for the creative process. It challenged me to think about the medium and my relationship to it - how I was holding it, how it felt in my hands, what my intuition told me to do with it...
That aside, I really like dough. It's as if it has a mind of its own - it never conforms how you want it to. I would stretch it and then it would immediately retract. I'd put a piece of metal in it and let it sit. Seconds later the original shape was gone. It took a little while to understand the dough's limitations, but after that things became more clear. I really liked what other people were doing, particularly with rolling the dough out and seeing what shapes it could fall or stretch or retract into. I liked the one where the dough draped over strings or dowels to look like a thick towel or garment. In the end, looking around at other people's work turned out to be a really helpful technique for ideas.
Tim Brown's speech was interesting too. I like a lot of what he said, but I thought what was most helpful was what he said about rules - when kids play productively, there are finite rules that these kids follow. In many of my other production classes, the free-for-all prompts have been both inhibiting to my creative process and just bothersome. I thought this first project with the dough, although very open ended, established an important rule - that we must make things with dough. Other rules certainly existed (make things in this time frame, with these other materials, using other peoples' ideas, etc.), but the rule that limited our material I thought was the most helpful for my creative process. If I have rules, I must figure out how to work with them - there are challenges and goals. If there are no rules, it's hard to figure out where to start.
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