Penny Hay is an artist, educator and researcher. She is Director of Research for ‘5x5x5=creativity’, an arts research charity and is a part-time Senior Lecturer in Arts Education at Bath Spa University. Her doctoral research was focused on how adults can support children’s identity as artists.
“Creative imagination” is what we normally consider to be creativity with a large C – composing an opera or discovering something groundbreaking. This is different from everyday creativity, such as coming up with imaginative solutions to household problems or making crafts.
Creative inspiration is notoriously elusive. Being able to train creativity or induce a state of creativity has therefore long been the aim of many artists and scientists.
But is it possible?
Kelly Chorpening is an artist, writer and educator. She has been the Course Leader for BA (Hons) Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL since 2006. Her recent experiments explore ways of materialising the form of language in order to test the fundamental processes of naming and identification that occur in both drawing and writing. She is currently co-editing, with Rebecca Fortnum, ‘A Companion to Contemporary Drawing’, containing newly commissioned essays on contemporary drawing, to be published in 2018.
Anna Ursyn is a professor and Computer Graphics/Digital Media Area Head at the School of Art and Design, University of Northern Colorado, USA. She combines programming with software and printmaking media, to unify computer generated and painted images, and sculptures.
In her role as Public Engagement Manager (Exhibitions) at the Francis Crick Institute, Bryony Benge-Abbott both curated and project managed ‘Deconstructing patterns’. She comes from an art and heritage background, having undertaken an undergraduate degree in Fine Art (Painting) at Bath Spa University and an MA in Museology at the University of East Anglia. Bryony joined the Crick early in 2016 to set up institute’s exhibition programme.
1A Arts runs an annual summer filmmaking project for 14-18 year olds, funded by Children in Need, where two professional filmmakers help a group of young people to create their own cinematic-quality short film. The project is free for participants. The film made in 2015, ‘Finding Yourself’ screened at the Foundling Museum, Warner Bros and Tate Britain and was a semi-finalist in the 2016 International Open Film Festival (IOFF). 2016’s film ‘Sketch of a Skit’ premiered at the Museum of Comedy in September 2016. 1A Arts worked with local young people to create the short film in the ‘Deconstructing Patterns’ exhibition zone ‘Breaking Symmetry’.
Poet in the City specialise in large-scale live events aimed at new audiences for poetry. Founded in 2006, the organisation brings poetry to life beyond books, producing classic and contemporary poetry performances, experiences and conversations taking on major ideas, issues and people. The group showcase biopics, use poetry to animate cultural moments and to peer into ideas past and present, and create dramatic poetry experiences in major arts venues and unusual spaces. They also support young people to become poetry producers and work with many volunteers, who all help to make a thriving arts community. For the ‘Deconstructing Patterns’ project, The Francis Crick Institute worked alongside Poet in the City to commission work by Sarah Howe and Chu-Li Shewring.
Nathan Goehring is a Junior Group Leader of the Polarity and Patterning Networks Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute and a Senior Research Associate in the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biology at UCL. He worked alongside young filmmakers from 1A Arts for the ‘Deconstructing Patterns’ exhibition. The result is a wonderfully surreal fictional narrative created by the students, which offers a metaphor for the lab’s research into the first appearance of asymmetry in the nematode worm ‘Caenorhabditis Elegans’.
Inspired by the natural world with a background in science, I make intuitive art with paint and mixed media then process images digitally to share educational stories and ideas. By using art to explore science, enhanced learning and insight can arise through both the creative process and the end result.
Leah Henrickson is a doctoral student at Loughborough University’s School of the Arts, English and Drama. Her current research focuses on discerning the social and literary implications of natural language generation. Her past research projects have focused on the visualities of medieval manuscripts and 1960s/70s American countercultural material.