The Gut Lights & Moon Shadows deck is a tool to facilitate conversation with creativity. Creativity animates our human experience in profoundly mysterious ways. Rather than conceptualize creativity as a possession, attribute, process or tool, I approach creativity as the aliveness of our complex interconnection with the world.
We come into presence with creativity through sensation. Our senses are portals through which we take in, feel, and interpret the world. Through these portals, the world passes in and out of us like breath. We sense and are sensed, and in that reciprocal dance is a creative, perceptual aliveness that shapes our experiential and interpretive relationships with the world. It turns our insides out and extends us beyond the limits of what we think of as our bodies. It is through these portals of our senses that we are lit up with the capacity for grand abstractions and glittering bridges of imagination between our physical experience and conjured realities.
The “Gut Lights” part of the title comes from a workshop that I created to facilitate an exploration of what we create, how we create, and why. Gut instinct, gut reaction — the reference to our guts is meant to bring our attention to the ways of knowing, mysterious and ancient, that are contained within us. The use of moon imagery is based on my intuitive relationship with the movement of the moon, with light and shadow and a curiosity about how the moon’s phases might offer a physical guide and metaphor for our relationship with creativity.
The guidebook prompts are written as explorations of creativity as a force, a process, and a companion in everyone’s lives, regardless of the kind of creative you believe yourself to be, even if you have never made anything you would call artistic. Cards invite interactivity: they can be used to play games, as divination tools, or as part of a daily reflection practice. I made this deck for anyone interested in engaging with the creative experience. The ways in which this tool is used differ with each person.
There is something a little bit magical about handling a deck of cards. On the table, they charge the space between you and them with a kind of energy, a material presence mixed, perhaps, with a kind of anticipation. There is a shape created in that space between your perceiving body and that deck of cards on the table. This space is filled with your exhalations, with the sounds and scents of your mergings-with this unique environment that you are co-creating, in that moment, with that deck of cards.
How is it to consider a concept while holding a card in your hands, feeling the smooth finish, the fibrous papery weight? How does thinking shift when we notice our body is part of the process, that shuffling, pausing, drawing a card, taking in a moment of sensory pleasure in the color and form we see on that card is how our complex human organisms think with physical form, with our full bodies and the environments that surround, inform, and inspire us?
These relationships animate this deck of cards and imbue them with magic, the magic that comes to us when we take note of all of the meaningful relationships in which we are already engaged. This can include traditions and aesthetics, practices, environments, the objects in our hands, the energies above our heads and materials under our feet. I made these cards so that we all might experience creativity in the spaces between all of these elements, the spaces that hold us, that we converse with and breathe into. It is my hope that they can help you experience, with wonder and awe, all that you are relation with.
EVENTS + ANNOUNCEMENTS
On September 3rd, I began my journey as Artist-in-Residence for the global, online course-festival We Will Dance With Mountains: Vunja! created by Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, hosted by the Emergence Network and joined by a fantastic group of guest teachers. In my role as Artist-in-Residence, which Bayo described as “weaving the embroidery of our journey together,” I am creating responsive artworks during /in dialogue with all nine of the live sessions, and will be offering my Drawing on the Senses workshops periodically throughout the course. Registration for this course is closed, but a slow study version of the course will be offered through For the Wild.
Red Hook Open Studios October 7 + 8, Risen Division, 70 Van Dyke St, Red Hook, Brooklyn
For Red Hook Open Studios this year, I will be presenting the first in my series of Drawing on the Senses field guides. Part site-specific artifact, part audio guide, this multimedia work will send explorers out into the wilds of Red Hook with prompts for stepping through strange portals of perception.
Come find me at Risen Division where you can also view the collaborative, lichen-inspired, hand-painted jumpsuits created by myself and designer/artist/technologist Andrea Lauer.
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