Calling all creatives to The Delivery Room!
"Oh! Oh! Quick visit from the mid-wife here, disappointment alert, red lights flashing in the corridors. Hello! Hello! Yes we're coming! We are on our way! (Imagine squeaky shoes as we turn quickly on the lino floors into your room.) Help is on it's way!!! Haha, are you feeling better? Quick breathing please, then slow, oh yes, nice a n d s l o w. B r e a t h e i n a n d o u t. (repeat a few times because I can't type like that for too long!!) You get this idea? I personally prefer home birth, birthing centres to hospitals, but occasionally we all can embrace modern concepts too and so I hope you will like my little tale to lighten your day. I hope by the time you read this you are feeling better. If not, throw a virtual massage into the scene, a warm birthing pool if need be and see if that helps. Haha. :)Suzi"
That was my reply after Day 19 in
The Delivery Room - Lamaze for the creative entrepreneur, an online ecourse created by Jessica Serran delivered to my inbox over three months. A parrallel experience carried through metaphor, as she prepares for an exhibtion of ten huge drawings, visual interpretaions of nine interviews she's undertaken as part of an exploration of the Czech psyche. An artwork that has been gestating for over two years as she explains in this short video.
It’s an interesting ecourse because not only do you get prime viewing of the ultrasound scans, you can also share your “big vision”, if you have one, which I discovered I didn’t:
"
Jessica, I was going to tell you I still don't have my "big idea" yet. I am doing what I am doing and it feels good and it feels right, but it's not a "vision" for how it ends. I don't have a problem with this. I was going to ask you if this is a problem, but now I find myself as mid-wife to you. So whilst I embrace the peace I have in this tiny in-between space, I hope you can too.
I have lots of ideas and they sometimes play a mixed up jigsaw puzzle in my head, but when I get time to sit and paint, doodle or draw, they all settle down and come out neatly one by one. Amazing. Doing left brained things helps too. Mindless tasks, like cleaning or preparing, getting ready, cleaning the canvas, for you know .... it will come .... when it AND you are ready! There's a baby inside, preparing to hatch. Sent with much love and laughter :)Suzi"
Jessica loves emails she said, in an early post in her
The Delivery Room ecourse, although when she wrote that she hadn’t met me! Hehe. Each week she offered advice in her
“tips and tricks”, really handy how too’s on all sorts of topics from visioning, setting intentions, how to organise your day to website designs, making maps and getting clear etc etc and openly confessed all in her
“guts and glory”, intimate
“seak peek” videos and amusing illustrations.
Have you seen her illustrations? Odd and quirky to the max, comprising all sorts of body parts and emotional extractions illuminated with written text. Musings of the mind, outpourings of stuff we accumulate both inside and out, portrayed not as we might wish, but just as they are, dislocated, separated and relocated in our own clumsy way as we try to make sense of this thing we call life. If you haven’t seen her work you really must. It’s the most daringly unique work I have seen online. It might scare you at first, but look closely and you’ll see through the soft feminine tints and stripey stockings are heart wrenchingly true illustrations. She draws you in, quite literally if you so desire, in a process she calls “Psychocartography”. Psycho What #@%!!!
Growing, expanding, evolving slowly over 30 or so emails, she allowed me to share initmately a few insights into how I see my world. I can’t speak for anyone else, because I never met my classmates, although now I am super curious, so if you happen to be one, please fess up and let me know!
"Yes thank you for your reply and really I must reply to your earlier question and maybe that also answers my question about "big visions". Maybe I am actually inside my "big vision" right now. I do go to the studio almost every day. It's in the village (please excuse if I repeat myself over these slightly protracted emails) I would love it at home, but I fear I would not get nearly so much done. I have no internet connection there. It's lovely and bright but it's slightly too public for internal work, but handy for being seen. Ahhh the betwix and between, the dance artists do! ....
I work to rhythms that I hear when I listen to the work that I do. As you may know I work on vastly different things, but space, place, time and story are the essence of what I do. Which is why I was attracted to you and your project. Originally a Landscape Architect, with a post graduate in Tourism, I've sold tropical flowers, worked in a second-hand bookshop part time and done a bazillion other things, like many mums. I wax and wane, kind of do a dance, to a rhythm set by the seasons, by the moon, by nature and by the nature of the projects I am working on. ....
I am really lucky to have a gift to see and feel these rhythms and the courage to work with them. Now you may see why I have no "big vision" an event that topples this balance. I don't have an end right now, because I am not sure how this ends, for it's based on a rhythm that’s neverending. There is birth and death at each phase and I find I have more energy for each one. I must leave it, because it leaves me.
Will a gallery ever sign me up? Will I ever get a grant? Will I get a commission to ....? I don't know. All I know is it's my fullest expression of what I can do right now, right here, with what I can. What I am open to do is to show others. Let others in ... I am doing my thing. I don't want others to copy me, I want to help others do their thing ... I know how I work isn't very western, isn't very linear ... maybe all I really need to do is allow myself to be free to be me, to be this strange little being.
Sending you many blessings. :)Suzi"
What I loved most about this way of working, a quite little ecourse held in silent solitude, was it worked for me, so much so that I change the way I worked. I closed down my class in the big art room in the village, pulled it back to my little studio. I started to do more and say less to those I’d meet in the street and went about more confident about who I am and the way I work best which is something I’d always struggled with in a society that screams “to be bigger is best”.
A few weeks later, after Day 25, I wrote to her again:
"Hello Jessica, dear one who keeps going, like a clock ticking, humming along to her own tune, not needing me to be there to get going. Ahh this is such a delight, a relief for in my world lots of things happen only because I make them happen, I act as a time keeper for so many things, so many others, that being able to open up my email and see Jessica has something for me, ready when I am ready is so nice.
You don’t stop because I stop reading, because life got too busy for a bit ...
You didn’t stop because I had to focus elsewhere ....
No you kept on going, to your rhythm, to your tune, making what you do available to me when I am available and for that I am thankful to the little people who make the internet what it is and for you for being clever enough to embrace this technology and make such opportunities accessible to me!
Ahh all is good in the world! :)Suzi"
As the impeding delivery loomed, as dates got closer, her soul was blending with mine like a baby and mother. Being “in-utero” once again in this safe little void, a vessel to carry us as we birth or re-birth our creative selves, I got clearer about who I am and what I do, which is vital for separation after the birth to allow the child to grow, to be who they need to be. I came to see parts of my past clearly as forming parts of who I am, allowing me to use this in my practice, opening up new worlds for my art.
“Gradually with time, I got used to it, moved on, assimilated, came to adore the buzz of the city, it’s beautiful beaches, glorious harbour and bushland surrounds, but I’ve never lost the need for the qualities of that place. Returning several times, many years later, I realise, it’s not a physical place I necessarily yearn for but the inner world that I had."
Finally, some three months later, after Day 30 in
The Delivery Room, I found myself offering her some advice. Teacher’s don’t always like that, students speaking up, giving back, but Jessica is not a teacher, she’s more of a guide, as she says a “Psyhocartographer” mapping out what is, showing a way, the way a fourth year major might help a first year newbie or a second year straggler. To be fair, we did actually meet as fellow students in
Kelly Rae Robert's Flying lessons but I found that fast and overwhelming whereas what was happening here was slow and personal. It’s an interesting role she likes to play and by letting me write, she let me learn I could write and so here's what I wrote on the eve of her birth:
One thing I find helpful, to counteract the fear as the tangent point approaches, that point where it's impossible to go back. Where the change from one point of existence to another passes, like the sun at the equinox, there's no turning back, no more of being that other way. Environments have changed, the other no longer exists. Or like travel, it exists but we are no longer there, we have moved on. To stay and pretend, would be a fantasy world. Instead the dream, this thing that you had always desired, is now the reality. Step up, step in, step through the veil and be in this new magical world that you have created.
We, all of us, get to do this each morning when we awake from our slumber, but since alarm clocks and other schedules have long forgot. It's morning time, the end of the old, the beginning of the new, the ending, the beginning, the coming and the going, the leaving and the starting, the being that and being this, the ... I could go on. Birth itself is a beautiful thing, rebirth contains choice, even more beautiful in a way. One thing remains, as I said earlier ...
... "gratitude, for many are far less fortunate."
For us westerner's have so much choice, we often forget what we need. Showing others how, is another gift from all this and it's certainly something you are doing. But as you almost pass out, feinting from the intensity of this impending birth, realise where you are and give thanks, it's the most wonderful potion to spur you on. Take it with water or a spoonful or sugar, if you need. Me I prefer to take it silently, quietly in serenity, ideally by the sea. A single dose of gratitude is all I need.
... aahhh you are nearly there.
So much love and gratitude to you for creating all this, this ecourse and everything it entails and thus enabling me to be here writing all this to you. Many blessing, for this which I have written will travel far, now that it's out, but it took you to do what you did all those months ago, to let me do what I am doing now. So you see what we are doing is not always about now, this moment, this intensity. It’s not always about us either, it’s about what we give to others in this world, what we give birth to and allow others to do. It's also not always to be understood, it is just to be done, that is all.
It is all any of us can do, the best we can do, which is what you have done. so thank you. :)Suzi
Of course nothing ever really ends. So as
The Delivery Room door closed with her announcement of a
gallery to hold the exhibition and completion of her
accompanying book, another door opened. Now with a
new website she is seeking crowdfunding to raise the funds she needs for publishing and exhibiting, check out her
crowd funding site.
But Jessica doesn’t simply ask, she gives! So if you would like to
find out about crowdfunding, a relatively new form of getting things done, giving birth to your baby, she’s showing you how in her new course
Clothe the Naked Baby that you can
register through her crowd funding page.
If you feel the need to back up a bit and give birth to your "Big Vision" you can visit
The Delivery Room first, (which is available as a single downloaded document
through her crowd funding page).
She’s also offering private
“Psychocartography” cartoons, signed copies of her book, personal interviews and bunch of other things. If you feel called to download a big wad of cash in her direction, she’s done a really ballsy thing and is offering
BIG MURAL DRAWINGS where she’ll fly to your door and paint on a wall whatever she sees in you! Go on I dare you! I’m sure when you see what she’s done, you’ll say, as Jessica would quite happily say “Holy Shit”!!! I guarentee, like her course, it will be something you’ll never forget!
Whatever you do, check out
Jessica Serran's Indigogo Crowdfunding site and donate what you can.
Big thanks to Jessica Serran for permission to use her images.
