inertia

Starting something creative can often feel so overwhelming that we never begin. There’s an inertia where we feel called to create, but experience resistance. Clarissa Pinkola Estes likens it to standing at the shore with our empty bucket, ready to fill it with water, but feeling too tired – even though our creative souls are so desperately thirsty. It’s only by consistently adding one drop, and then another, that we find flow and fill our creative bucket.  

Inertia, 2021, Installation, felt, cotton thread, fishing line and aluminium buckets.

Creativity is like a river. Turn it on and life flows and flourishes, turn it off and we become stuck and stagnant.

Adelaide artist Kari Doyle leads the viewer through these flowing waters, exploring themes of cultivating a creative practice, the emotional tides that arise as one sets out to discover new territories, and reconnecting to childlike wonder.

“I feel like my life now is in service of protecting that metaphorical creative river. There is a tending, a nurturing, to keep the ideas flowing and to clear away the gunk.”

This mighty river can be both tranquil and tumultuous, as the artist is either carried effortlessly to safe shores...or tossed amongst a surging current, struggling to stay afloat and in flow.

At other points along the creative river, the water may wane as one’s ideas, inspiration and intentions muddy:

“When I left university, I chose a path of security, certainty and predictability. I turned my back on my creativity, very rarely making. Slowly over the years, without paying much attention, my creativity had become blocked and unclear.”

“I also struggled to fit in...to feel like I belonged. I spent much of my life believing that if I just did one specific thing, I would finally feel like I had arrived.”

And yet, as Kari discovered, it’s the many little actions over time that add up – the individual drops that blend and merge to surge the creative river on. With one drop at a time, one may find flow and fulfilment. Clarity. New life.

“All the eyes in my work reflect a search for validation outside of myself, only to discover I needed to learn to belong to myself...to belong to my own creative river.”

As you wade into The Creative River, know that you too belong here. You are seen. You are one. And while the water may seem muddy and the journey beyond the next bend unclear, with one drop of wonder at a time, your creative river will flow freer and further than you ever imagined.

As Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote:

“When creativity stagnates in one way or another, there is the same outcome: a starving for freshness, a fragility of fertility, no place for smaller life forms to live on the interstices of larger life forms, no breeding of this idea to that one, no hatch, no new life. Then we feel ill and want to move on. We wander aimlessly, pretensions we can get along without the lush creative life or else by faking one; but we cannot, we must not. To bring back creative life, the waters have to be made clean and clear again. We have to wade into the sludge, purify the contaminates, re-open the apertures, protect the flow from future harm.” 

Your creative river awaits...

Is this Procrastination?, 2020, Digital Animation

Know Thyself, 2019, Digital Montague