Listen, talk, share, smile.
Blog: Gordon MacLellan
These have been a strange few weeks…months…years, really. The “lockdown” years delivered a body blow to my freelance work that was already staggering after years of “austerity cutbacks” (I’m based in UK – not sure what it’s like for you creatives in other countries). Most of my professional work is with young people and communities, telling stories, creating stories, empowering people to creatively explore their relationships with the world around them and that is something that disappears when the funding gets tough!
One of the aspects of all this uncertainty that really intrigues me, is how we creatives respond to adversity. Here as grants have got fewer and harder to get and as money in general public funds has diminished, there are two almost diametrically opposite responses I meet. In one, artists and associated groups or companies dig in, hang onto anything they can get, raise walls, do not collaborate. Entrench. Understandable. It’s a survival strategy. Then there are others who recognise “no, I haven’t got much of anything: work, money, optimism” so let’s try to change the story. Here, we work together. Little money but we try to make sure we work with new artists and that what work there is, is shared out. And we cooperate, collaborate, plan adventures, support each other in all this uncertainty. It doesn’t mean we’re any more successful, but it helps for us as individuals. We grow with inspiration, connection, laughter and maybe feed just a bit more hope.
For a determined environmentalist like me, all of this reflects on other issues. I think that, as a society, we need to recognise those same reactions around us and reflect upon the difference between digging in and retreating behind walls and stepping out and taking risks. Yes, we may need more laws, more treaties, more COP-26, 27, 20-whatever’s-next agreements but we need something deeper, as well. We need that community-based readiness to take a risk: to listen, to talk, to share, to find ways of working together, to respect each other as people and to respect the world around us.
And all of that then winds its way back to this season since the 2022 Creativity Conference. I’m exploring new partnerships, building new links, having new conversations. Over this year, I’ve been working with the theatre company Border Crossings (organisers of the Origins festival of indigenous artists – links below). Here, as the project storyteller, I’ve been working on their Botany Bay school garden project. Encouraging schools to grow vegetables (lots of pumpkins, maize, tomatoes, strawberries, chilis) we have been working to build an understanding of the cultures those plants come from. We hope that appreciating the respect that plants are held in in those cultures might build a different experience of them here. My role has been to work with our young gardeners to build new stories, write poems about their experience. Now, as the project reaches the end of a growing season, we’re holding garden ceremonies: celebrations of plants, children, creativity and food!
Then there has been a role as poet-in-residence with the Bold Plans And Faith-consistent Investing Conference organised by FaithInvest. Here, as well as coordinating creative interruptions during the proceedings providing time to pause and reflect, I spent most of the conference simply sitting and listening. Listening to discussions and presentations I didn’t fully understand but taking intentions, reactions, atmospheres and comments. “Feeling the room” to grow new poems and to remind people that the faiths work as much through stories as anything else – so the final day of the conference turned into a medieval quest inspired by those terms and processes. Reckless Caution, Asset, Investments, Due Process, became characters, perils, castles and marvels in a quest for new beginnings.
New beginnings? Simply trying: exploring, accepting, challenging myself and being prepared to have a go….to enter new conversations with imagination, interest and a sense of colourful delight
Gordon MacLellan
Gordon is an artist and storyteller better known as Creeping Toad, or simply Toad. Combining a background in zoology and environmental education, his work celebrate the relationships between people, places and wildlife. He is included in the issue 4 of the Forget-me-not-press journal, “Into The Dark” due out end of November of their journal https://www.forgetmenotpress.net/