Sharing your creative voice

What do you want to get out of it?

It’s not easy to create art and then believe in it enough to share it with the world.

Art created this summer at a Dormer Window Studio workshop, currently on display at Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works.

Over the past couple months, I’ve been shepherding a group of talented, brave and open people into and out of their creative voice.

They’ve been attending some of my workshops, and yesterday their poems, artwork, photography and stories became part of the tapestry of Toronto’s largest urban green space at the Evergreen Brick Works.

I think art-making can be confusing. It confuses me.

There’s a desire to create beauty and feel understood. The finished product is the measure.

Yet art is meant to shake up the system, to vibrate in crevices that pull people away from efficiency, production, and all other capitalist procedures.

After working so hard on a story, I expect money, accolades, people to see its magic and feel changed by it.

But art is a bold, hard and funny thing. And I seem to keep discovering this.

Its value can’t simply be cast in what it looks like when it’s done, and how the world reacts to it. It’s about the process you enter into in order to make the thing.

And that process is not easy.

When putting words and marks onto blank paper, you’re confronted with fear, confusion, risk. Does my perspective matter? Is it right?

The magic happens when the fear transitions to tenderness, and you let the playful, bold and fearless voice through. You give it air-time in your head and in your body.

That’s it. That’s what it’s worth.

For the Brick works show, Kirsten Webb wrote 2 poems and created 3 visual pieces of art I’d like to share with you all. I knew immediately when she joined the group that she had something very human and important to say about our relationship with the natural world. Here’s one of her poems called The Seedling. Enjoy…

Her full collection of art and poetry can be viewed on the project website, where you can also read and listen to other bold and tender poems and stories from the project.

A small but important note: the project was funded by Thorncliffe Park Urban Farmers. The opportunity to create art in community and in nature, couldn’t have happened with out them.

If you can, do consider donating to help them continue operating as a truly nourishing space in our urban jungle!