Creativity and the Artist

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Buy the recording

Creativity and the Artist

with Jessica Ball,  Alison Churchill, Emma Cocker and Hester Reeve

Saturday August 14, 2021
9:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST  |  18:00 CEST

2-hour session

If you are unable to attend the live session, the recording will be available.

David Bohm’s writing on creativity was not directed exclusively at art works, instead it sought to outline a more foundational capacity in any one of us – or in any human discipline – for new orders of perception and understanding. First and foremost, he explained, we need to awaken the necessary ‘creative mind state’ which is supressed by the unrecognized “boss reality” of Western thought, language and the associated entrapment of the self-image. Bohm’s is a dynamic model of creativity open to entanglements of mind, body, language, conceptual abstraction, non-human matter and infinity, the nature of which is to be continually unfolding, to be generative. His expanded notion of what constitutes an ‘artform’ is radical and speaks to contemporary, speculative approaches towards ever opening up an animate world of which we are a participant.

Four artists, all of whom recognise first-hand the creative potential of Bohm Dialogue to individual and social transformation, will explore their concerns, ideas and experiences together.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Series

Jessica Ball is a creative facilitator dedicated to working towards positive social and environmental change through transformative learning, dialogue and the value of creativity. With a background in fine art, textile design (Chelsea College of Art and Design, BA) and sustainable fashion (London College of Fashion, MA), she grounds her work in design thinking and creative methods to support people to engage, connect, reflect and express. Her approach to  workshop design and facilitation encourages participants to explore various themes such as culture, identity and values, gender equality and the relevance of sustainability to their lives.  Her work aims to provide a creative and engaging space for participants to better understand themselves; improve their relationships with other people; and become more aware and engaged in the world around them. Jessica has worked with a diverse range of organisations across sectors from corporate and international development to education and charities.

Alison Churchill is a visual artist in Sheffield with a practice exploring the creative force contained in water and the patterns of disruption, coherence and emergence which play out on its surface. She is developing an online collaborative art practice with artists in the UK, which comes out of an over ten-year experiment with four female artists based in the US and Israel exploring the creative process beyond the individual.

Churchill has been involved in a number of projects exploring intersubjective consciousness, including Scott Peck’s Community Building, Bohm Dialogue and Emergent Dialogue.

Churchill is a junior Rinzai Zen teacher and lead regular Zen Brushwork sessions in Sheffield, which involve meditation, energy-raising exercises and calligraphy using a large brush.

 Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University, whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ therein. Her practice unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought; Stillness in a Mobile World; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art; Reading/Feeling; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, and the solo collection, The Yes of the No. Emma was co-researcher on the artistic research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014–2017); a contributing artistic researcher in Ecologies of Practice, Research Pavilion, Venice, (2019); and is co-founder of the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group on Language-based Artistic Research.

Hester Reeve’s practice encompasses live art, philosophy, drawing, David Bohm’s ‘Dialogue’ and social sculpture.

She is interested in the relationship between critical thinking and human agency in everyday life, particularly when it is risked through the figure of ‘the artist’ (where what constitutes an artist is broadly conceived and not exclusive to art school training).

Recent public works have been staged at Tanzquartier, Vienna, Tate Britain (working under the umbrella of The Emily Davison Lodge with Olivia Plender) and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Hester Reeve is Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.