I’ve been really fortunate to get funding from Future Bright for mentoring by Mark Devereaux. I’m grateful that Future Bright didn’t try to shoehorn me into one of the many and excellent courses run by Outset West because I’m not the kind of entrepreneur that wants to expand her business. I asked Mark to help me consolidate what I do so I can work more effectively.

At my core, I’m a compulsive maker of things. Apparently the devil makes work for idle hands, with me idle hands make me sad. I think this is a combination of my upbringing by a grandmother who was the embodiment of make do and mend, and my Aphantasia. Without a visual minds eye, if I want to see what I am imagining, I have to make it.

Mark got to the root of the problem in session 1. I have 2 main hats, one as a commercial designer and one as a fine artist. We agreed I should split them up, with this website (www.lisa-cole.co.uk) as my place to document my creative research and a new site www.thinking-green.co.uk to bring in paid work as a graphic and web designer, branding and social media expert, engagement consultant, teacher of design thinking and community artwork. For the last few years I’ve been blogging as less-stuff, less-waste so Thinking Green also encompasses all the sustainable and ethical ethos I try to live by.

I’ve pruned down this site and started the new site. It dawned on me that all my paid commercial work is human centered but my fine art is generative, or made by chance, or performative using plastic cats as the actors. There is little human contact in the core of my fine art.

I make objects from songs and poems that were originally from humans, but I play them through machines, or print them out.

I make ceramic pots in shapes inspired by space travel and the hunt for alien lifeforms. They are then decorated by birds.

I’m wondering if this polarised creative lifestyle is a reaction. I know I get emotionally exhausted by seeing too many people at once, is all the stuff I do without humans a way of recharging.

I don’t have answers, I just needed to get this out of my head so I can think about it further.

From one end to the other this is what I do:

Very human centered

Mentoring

Teaching design thinking

Blogging

Community art work

Graphic and web design

<the middle>

Tiny Cat Gallery

Tactile and visible sound

Bird and wind drawings

Very not human centered

I don’t have a better way to say ‘very not human centered yet’. I remain, as always a work in progress playing the Infinite Game.


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