Accounts of Wonder Workshop, Wednesday July 29 at Community Print, Olympia 6 - 8 pm, $35, register at link
More on Accounts of Wonder here. If you’d be interested in doing a virtual version, let us know—we’ll schedule one if there’s interest.
Collective Art Project at the Olympia Library, Monday, August 24, 3:30 - 5pm. drop-in, free, all ages welcome! (scroll to bottom for more info)
Welcome to the Prompt Portal. We’re playing hard this summer getting the Joyful Practice handbook print ready, so this week we wanted to offer a little preview of the book, along with a prompt for exploring your creative hedgerows.
What’s a creative hedgerow?
Hedgerows, which are often planted to mark the edge of a farmer’s field, are a type of gap edge, or a place where two different ecosystems bump up against each other and create a microclimate. Gap edges are full of biodiversity and an abundance of wildlife.
Now imagine your creative process as a hedgerow, a place where different types of ideas, mediums, and genres all mingle together and create new forms of creative exploration. We can call that interdisciplinary, sure, or multi-modal, but I like the metaphor of the creative hedgerow.
Before we get into this week’s prompt, let’s have a little share and tell from the Joyful Practice Handbook.
Ecotones, Homes of Tension.
In her newsletter, The Overview, Willow Defenbaugh wrote an essay about ecotones. She explains the etymology of the word:
“Their name combines eco from the Greek oikos, meaning home, environment, with tone from tonos, tension. They are homes of tension and potential.”
An estuary is an example of an ecotone. In the swirling tension of brackish water, a dynamic and abundant ecosystem flourishes. Crabs and coots and sandpipers and seals and eagles and falcons, even jellyfish and nudibranchs. Estuaries are wild and wacky convergent zones.
May your body be a home for creative tension and potential. May your body be an estuary, creatively dynamic, a convergent zone for wild ideas and abundant collaborations.
Gap Edges, The Edge Effect.
My understanding is emergent, but from what I’ve learned, gap edges are not synonymous with ecotones. They’re more like close relatives. Many gap edges are human-made. Hedgerows come to mind.
Aldo Leopold came up with the term edge effect. When the edges of two habitats meet, we get a gap edge, a place where biodiversity flourishes.
I’ve started thinking about my body’s experience of analog creative practice as a gap edge because I move between modes of creating with more ease than when I’m working digitally.
Mind the gap edge.
What if the body is the gap edge and creativity is its abundance?
When I say mind the gap edge, I’m saying pay attention to your creative edges, those places where one idea, mode, medium ends and another begins. Let them merge, overlap, Inform one another.
When I say mind the gap edge, I’m asking you to play in the hedgerow of your creative process. Taste all the genres and mediums. Take advantage of the in between.
Most borders are made by humans to contain and control.
May your creative play be borderless. May you ride the tension of discovering something new. The gap edge will hold you. It is, after all, inside of you.
A prompt for exploring your creative hedgerows
Who lives in the hedgerows of your creative playscape?
How do they want to play with you?
What creative mediums are calling to you from the safety of the hedgerow?
Choose the medium. Choose the playmate. Explore together.
From The Scrap Heap Archive:
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