Guiding Creativity Workshops Using Crafts for Older Adults

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Based on a work at agingandcreativity.blogspot.com

I am providing a session titled: The Creative Experience- Profiles of Courage and Passion on Tuesday, October 2^nd  at the 2012 Regional Conference on Aging hosted by the Philadelphia Corporation of Aging in Philadelphia. . The following information focuses on Creativity Workshops using Crafts and is an excerpt from that presentation.

In general, I recommend that the leader assess projects for these attributes to provide a successful workshop.

□        Interesting: Materials should trigger curiosity and encourage  willingness to engage

□        Engaging: Materials/project keeps participants involved

□        Clear Objectives: Explanation of tools, techniques and goal; Guidance NOT Duplication of examples shown

□        Success Driven: Encourage satisfaction and completion

□        Socially Supportive Community: Community and  individual respect

□        Project Appropriate for Participants with respect to:

□        Gender

□        Physical ability

□        Cognitive issues

□        Psychological concerns

To encourage safe crafting, it is important to develop projects with attention to these guidelines:

□        No Sharp Tools

□        No Precision

□        No Tiny Pieces

□        No Lengthy Projects

□        No Complex Directions

□       No Difficult Learning Curve

Examples of techniques that may be considered in a project include:

□        Wrapping

□       Weaving

□        Knotting

□        Threading

□        Gluing

□        Cutting (with assistance/supervision if appropriate)

□        Stamping

□        Rubbing

□       Tearing

The participants are likely to realize positive results because the workshop experience:

 

□        Builds knowledge of

□        Materials

□        Techniques

□        Increases

□        Self Esteem

□        Socialization

□        Fosters

□        Independence

□        Problem Solving

□        Expands

□        Creative Capability

□        Confidence

For additional information or speaker and/or workshop requests, please contact Judith Zausner at Judith@caringcrafts.com

"Arts  and aging is neither about arts, nor just about aging. Rather, it is about creativity and positive engagement—that is, creativity as both a goal and a process for shaping the self and society.“

-Steven T. Dahlberg
International Centre for Creativity & Imagination

 

For Veterans: Art Making and Transformation

There are many hurdles in life and, for veterans, many of these hurdles seem insurmountable. The war zone has scorched traumatic memories in their psyche that may sit buried and unreachable. Fortunately now there are innovative support groups that provide a cathartic relief through creativity.

Combat Paper, a New Jersey non profit, is an extraordinary program that travels around the country to help veterans’ relieve their stress from the effects of war. It fully embraces a creative process in three stages. Starting with “Deconstructing”, the veterans bring in their worn combat fatigues for shredding to begin the paper making process, then the shredded small fabric pieces are pulverized to produce paper pulp which begins the “Reclamation” process. They get to reclaim their uniforms as paper. The third stage is “Communication” because when the paper is dry, they can write poetry or draw images on it to communicate their feelings and/or stories.

As they are go through this transformation process of their uniforms and internally themselves, each person is encouraged to talk and share their war experience with facilitators who also have military backgrounds. For most of these veterans, it is the first time they have spoken about traumatic events from the combat zone. Since the workshops are closed sessions for veterans only, they feel safe to open up and process emotions and memories that have previously been untouched. This is a community of veterans helping other veterans to heal with psychologically, emotionally and physically through a creative journey of inner exploration.

Drew Cameron, an Iraq war veteran and talented artist, co-founded Combat Paper in 2007 with his idea to “liberate the rag”. He says "The story of the fiber, the blood, sweat and tears, the months of hardship and brutal violence are held within those old uniforms. The uniforms often become inhabitants of closets or boxes in the attic. Reshaping that association of subordination, of warfare and service, into something collective and beautiful is our inspiration."

With the success of Combat Paper, other organizations have formed to support veterans’ healing through art. Warrior Writers Project is a Philadelphia based non-profit that is a “community of military veterans, service members, artists, allies, civilians, and healers dedicated to creativity and wellness”. There is emphasis on writing although they also encourage other mediums such as painting, photography. To expand their reach, Warrior Writers also offers trainings, retreats, exhibitions, performances and alternative healing practices that include massage and yoga. They have recently published their third anthology After Action Review, which showcases more than 100 veteran poems, creative writing and art.

Inspired by Combat Paper and Warrior Writers, in March 2011, Veterans in The Arts, a Minneapolis based organization, began offering classes. Their direction includes literary, visual as well as musical initiatives. Although new to this approach of creative healing, they have already received the support of ten art partners to build on their mission.

Being deployed overseas will generate feelings of loss of family and friends but it is very difficult to predict what experiences the soldiers come back with. These organizations strive to heal those wounds through sharing, art making and heart felt support.


Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller

Optimizing the Patient Doctor Relationship

Relationships matter. Good relationships have a mutual investment in time, energy and compassion. It’s the way we express our involvement and when, over time, the scale tips out of balance, the relationship falters. It may be intentional but it’s always a shift that benefits from communication.

So even though we maintain many different relationships, what we expect from our dry cleaner is not what we would expect from our best friend. Yet all relationships are invisibly tethered by an agreement of respect and a willingness to interact.

Our patient-doctor relationship holds these same principles. In addition to respect, there is deep seated trust because we are seeking his/her professional expertise in our personal health care. This is an important relationship yet why do some people fail to take responsibility for it? Why respond passively, inaccurately or impatiently when you can actively engage with your physician and participate in your own care?

Dr. Don Friedman recommends that patients do away with their sense of powerlessness and advocate on their own behalf. “There is a therapeutic sense of control”, says Dr. Friedman, “when a patient participates in his health care”.

He suggests 4 approaches to maximize your doctor visits:

1. Prior to your office visit, make a list of all the questions you need to ask and all the information you need to share.
2. Be sure to express your concerns about your medical issues. If your doctor doesn’t know about them, your doctor can’t help.
3. Clarify your understanding of all aspects of your illness: lab results, symptoms, life style changes, etc. Ask if you need more information.
4. Understand the instructions you are given and the responsibilities you have for managing your treatment. Repeat the instructions back to your doctor to ensure you’ve interpreted them correctly.

This is common sense yet sometimes our inner self makes it difficult while our outer capacity for organizing can also be an issue. So create tricks for yourself to get in the game of having a proactive relationship with your health. Keeping a journal helps with both the inner and outer turmoil. Decorate it, flag it; stream your thoughts, doodle. Personalize it in a way that makes it important to you and provides positive feelings each time you make an entry. Make sure that it is in a place that is easily accessible. It will be helpful to create a separate section for health notes and remember to always bring it on visits to your doctor.

Learn to be an advocate for yourself; you deserve the good results.

As Albert Schweitzer, the Nobel Prize winning physician said:
The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason all the rest of us doctors succeed. Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing this truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.

REUSE, REPURPOSE, RECREATE

There are second lives. Not for us but for tangible items in our lives.

Many of us fill our homes with beautiful things that we love. But that love can expire; things get old, worn out, broken, boring and then tossed out and replaced by new beloved items. It’s a cycle that is both cathartic and potentially wasteful.

So it is exciting and inspiring to witness the movement that interprets things to transform it from its original state. Some processes are simple to approach. In my world teaching creativity workshops, we use empty toilet paper rolls to make napkin rings, paper clips to make necklaces, cut fruit for stamping designs and assorted old magazines for collage,decoupage, and paper beads. While others may require more skill and tools, they all encapsulate a vision that flexes to see things differently.

In Paraguay where a violin is worth more than a house, the Landfillharmonica was created to use recycled materials to make them in to functional musical instruments to play beautiful music. This is extraordinary and inspiring.

In general, there are basically two groups: one group uses things to repurpose them in to functional pieces while another group creates nonfunctional items in art.

Examples in the functional realm:

• Don’t throw out that old bicycle until you have thought about transforming its parts into a chair, table or bookshelves.:
• A coffee shop made of shipping crates and, yes, it's a Starbucks.is a great architectural feat • Using just the bottoms of old plastic water bottles, a beautiful chandelier is born http://inhabitat.com/recycled-water-bottle-cascade-chandelier/
• Harvesting mushrooms in recycled coffee grinds was made into a big business by two young college graduates, Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez, who turned down lucrative job offers to pursue entrepreneurship.
• Stuart Haygarth creates exceptional chandeliers that are made of found objects from plastic bottles to beach debris to eyeglass frames.
• Old tube tires are used as a fabulous source for fashion accessories produced by Hope for Women which sells handcrafted fair trade products made by economically disadvantaged women worldwide.
A bicycle made from cardboard was created by an Israeli inventor who was inspired by seeing a canoe made of paper.
Plastic waste from fishermans' excursions are transformed to create furniture.
Jorge Penades uses leather waste from shoe and automobile industries, for example, and shreds them, adds glue and its set in iron moulds and then glued.

Micaella Pedros, a recent Design graduate, makes furniture joints using discarded plastic bottles by heat shrinking them..

Examples in the art world:
• Louise Nevelson- created mammoth “assemblages” made from discarded wood, cans and other materials and uniformly painted them in one color to unify the objects in the sculpture.
• Joseph Cornell sought a variety of discarded elements to frame them in boxes that evoke memories, thoughts, curiosity.
• John Chamberlain innovatively used crushed and twisted automobile parts to create sculpture that was both colorful and dynamic.
• Brian Jungen uses ordinary objects to create extraordinary art. Whether its sports jerseys, sneakers or even golf bags, Brian is masterful at creating new objects that are artful and amazing.
• So much litter is washed ashore from our oceans and now some of it is being reclaimed and transformed into very special art.
An Israeli student of fashion design is using live bacteria to create spectacular prints that are being used in accessories and clothing.
Donna Mc Cullough creatively recycles using artful welding

The movement that reuses, repurposes and recreates ordinary objects enlightens our lives and provides lessons in creativity. These are made by people who look at the world around them with greater flexibility and a unique vision. We benefit from these transformations just as much as our environment benefits from a reduced landfill.

Recycle Reuse Repurpose Recreate RETHINK

The purpose - where I start - is the idea of use. It is not recycling, it's reuse. ---Issey Miyake

One of the best ways to get people to look at artwork is to create it out of materials that they recognize. -Jungen.

Apfel at Age 90: More is More and Less is Simply Less

Forget the old saying “Less is More”. Minimalists thrived on that belief because it validated their art but the contemporary fashion niche embraced by Iris Apfel makes a different statement. Turn your head 180 degrees and open your eyes wide and your mind even wider. There she is; a fashion maverick, an irreverent renegade, a defiant creative spirit and a marvel of exquisite opulence of wearables.

“I’m a geriatric starlet, my dear, don’t you know,” she said “All of a sudden, I’m hot; I’m cool; I have a ‘fan base’.”*

With a rising cult of diverse people spilling around her amazing presence, Apfel is taking her show on the road. The HSN road, that is. Middle America is fascinated and wants this design eccentricity to be a brand in their lives. Naturally much will be in translation. For example, her classic owl shape eyeglasses will be featured in a scarf print and tribal type necklaces are modified with respect to design and price.
Iris was always a fashion maven. “My mother worshipped at the alter of accessories and I got the bug. She always said, if you have a good, little, simple black dress and you have different accessories, you can have 27 different outfits.” So she learned early. “The fun of getting dressed is that it is a creative experience and I never know what it’s going to be.” She assiduously edits her ensembles often wearing a basic architectural type of garment that can be accessorized dramatically. In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City presented an exhibition about Apfel called Rara Avis (Rare Bird): The Irreverent Iris Apfel. It was so successful that they created a traveling version that could be viewed by other audiences.
“Composing the elements of interior and composing an ensemble are part and parcel of the same thought process” says Apfel. So she was a natural watching her father in his business working with high end mirrors that focused on interiors. This passion for interiors catapulted the careers of Iris and her husband, Carl. Serendipitously they started working with Old World Weavers in search of a certain cloth and then began to travel worldwide looking for both exotic fabrics and historically based designs that could be replicated by these foreign specialty mills. It was through this work that she was asked to consult for the White House interior for Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton.
Married 64 years, she and her almost 100 year old husband wear the same perfume called Yatagan by Caron which is hard to find so they store it in big containers in the refrigerator. They also wear similar round spectacles. An amazing couple, they have been very successful in their fabric business and, despite retirement from Old World Weavers in the 1990s, it’s clear that Iris’s fame is soaring. This radical fashion icon will be featured in an upcoming documentary by Albert Maysles while she continues to design products for various companies and has the magnanimous vision to donate more than 900 pieces from her wardrobe to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

Iris Apfel is an iconic legend with the bravado and mastery of greatness.

“You only have one trip (one life) so you might as well enjoy it”
Iris Apfel

Origami & Creative Possibilities

Origami is the exquisite trilogy of paper, math and art. It’s recreational play for children and serious play for adults; everyone extracting his/her own purpose and pleasure by engineering forms using old Japanese techniques. Using only paper and without scissors or glue, extraordinary forms from bugs to moose to the more traditional flowers can be created with the understanding of folds. Experts cannot agree about the origins of origami. Some say that it began in the first or second century in China when paper was very rare and the art was therefore reserved for the wealthy. But others trace its roots to the 1600s in Japan. Today, there are online clubs, more formal worldwide associations and about every five years a unique conference is held in a country where people are invested in exploring the art, science and technology of origami at an advanced level that focuses on tessellation algorithms, tree theory and other mathematical approaches. Considered the father of origami because of his important innovations to the craft, Akira Yoshizawa created a bridge from old classic origami to the new contemporary art. He designed the notational system which is a pictorial diagrammatic guide with dots and arrows that documents a piece of origami as a pattern and therefore allows it to be understand and replicated. The technique of wet folding was also developed by Akira and was used for manipulating thick paper. Passionate and prolific, he created more than 50,000 models before his death at age 94. Robert Lang (http://www.langorigami.com) is a great Western master of origami who practices his craft using skills as an artist and an engineer. His large range of work includes both very tiny and very large pieces and among his most inspiring is a 1000 scale snake. By creating a computer program to generate crease patterns, his work truly takes on the infinite possibilities of mastering the crease for art as well as technology. In his TED presentation (http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_lang_folds_way_new_origami.html) , he talks origami based products that have been used successfully in our everyday lives. The concept for all of these is simple: it has to fold small with the ability to expand on release. One example is a heart stent that holds open a blocked artery that was designed by Zhong You and Kaoru Kuribayashi and manufactured in stainless steel. Another product that is used more frequently is the air bag that resides in our car and pops out quickly to expand and protect us when there is a sudden impact. This air pillow has been compressed using folding techniques to minimize its volume on rest. For a visual story, the independent movie Between the Folds beautifully delivers a comprehensive look at origami by showing its complexity, its beauty and the people who make it an art form. Vanessa Gould, the Director, says “At its heart, Between the Folds is a film about potential. The potential of an uncut paper square. The potential of a wild scientific idea. The potential to see things differently”. The transformation of two dimensions to three dimensions can be a transformation of what you believe is possible. Yet, origami is all about creative possibilities. “Origami may someday even save a life.”-Robert Lang

Reinventing Embroidery: Experimental and Extraordinary Art

New work has emerged that has revolutionized the concept of embroidery as a traditional handcraft. Gone are those little blue “x”s printed on cloth for following an embroidery pattern. These new artists have transformed the basic concept of this craft and have elevated it to an exceptional art form.

Shizuko Kimura is 75 years old. Born in Japan, she studied painting and then received a degree in textiles from the Royal College of Art in London. She uses thread like a pencil to explore the human form and create portraits that are both exquisite in detail and mysterious for missing detail. There’s excitement to her work created by the movements of her threads to capture images that are so extraordinarily graceful that they appear drawn like an old master with pencils and charcoal. Fabric backgrounds are quietly small and solid or elegantly thin transparencies as long banners of organza.

A Yale University and Brooklyn College graduate, and now about 70 years old, Elaine Reichek’s work is in the 2012 Whitney Bienniale. She studied painting when it was a predominantly male centric circle, and then began to explore changing her media to express her art and, as she says “translate information from one form to another”. Using the computer for printing, for Photoshop, for pixilation as well as the computerized embroidery machine, much of her art is technology driven and Elaine explains “The idea of using the computer isn’t incidental to my work, it’s not just a technical shortcut; it’s part of the work’s hybrid character.”

Abstraction that expertly plays with color, form and stitchery thrives in Bette Uscott-Woolsey’s art “With a painters eye I approach textile materials (using mostly heavy silks) incorporating historic textile techniques as well as contemporary painting” says Bette who holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin and New York University. Never hesitating to incorporate different techniques and media, Bette, now in her 60’s, professes that she “loves to work with silk and thread”. This is evident in the splendor and range of her work which has been shown in numerous galleries and featured in many fiber art books.

Another approach to redefining embroidery is the art by Daniel Kornrumpf. He’s a young artist with a MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and has honed his visual and technical skills to create modest sized and extraordinary embroidered portraits. Using natural linen fabric stretched across a classic painter type frame, he expertly commands a full palette of colored fibers (believed to be the classic embroidery floss) to depict faces that are so densely stitched and complex in tone that one has to look closely to see that it is created with thread and not paint. The subtleties and nuances of both texture and color elevate his art to extraordinary.

These artists are also renegades in their approach to integrate embroidery to the world.

Clyde Olliver “started stitching and making objects in paper and cardboard at around age 6” but it was not until he was in his 40s that he enrolled in art classes and then stone carving and life drawing. Now in his 60s, Clyde says “Much of my work lies between the disciplines of sculpture and embroidery, since typically it consists of stitched slate or other suitable stone.

Laura Splan created a series of “traditional” doilies using computer machine embroidery to depict biomedical complexities.

Christa Maiwald whose embroidered portraits are socio-political commentaries.

Trained in art, many as painters, these fiber artists have utilized the traditional craft of embroidery as a new language in their art. As fiber artists, they have explored, created and launched new approaches using age old embroidery techniques.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
Henri Matisse