Mark Price is a student on the Creative Writing MA. He is undertaking a residency with the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing, exploring practitioner-researchers’ perceptions and experiences of creativity and interdisciplinarity.

I’m a student again. Our assignments on the MA often have a creative task, and then a more critical, academic piece too. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the creative elements are generally more popular.

But I was, and still am, an ‘academic’ (though this doesn’t always rest easy with me). My writing now – creatively, academically – has taken me to explore the relationship between the two; and to explore the nature of creativity and interdisciplinarity in research.

Fundamentally, I experience learning and research to be relational processes. So, in joining the Centre of Arts and Wellbeing, I want to question and explore:

• How do we research creatively?
• How does creativity reside with us, in our work, in our writing, in our research?
• And how does interdisciplinarity shape and influence this creativity?

I’m interested in that weave and flow and criss-cross and wandering, across and between boundaries of identity and form. Between research and creativity.

I was speaking with Jess [Moriarty, co-director of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing] about this recently. She was telling me how lucky she feels, in that so often, she gets to work with people that she looks up to and admires and feels inspired by. And because of this it makes her commit to the work, to the other person, even more.

She told me:

If you’re working on your own, the potential to procrastinate or do 100 things at once, is quite strong. Whereas if you’re working with people that generally inspire and motivate your own thinking and work, then you need to give time and space to that. And not just time and space, but discipline too.

And when we have that commitment to working together, whether it’s for a funding bid or an article and so on, I don’t mind as much now, when things fail– I think I’ve got better at accepting that. Of course, essentially, I do want something to come out of it and I feel like I owe it to the people I’m collaborating with to try and make sure that happens. But I think they feel like this too – like that there’s that kind of unspoken contract between us.

It seems that something happens – transformatively – when we work creatively, collaboratively with others. When we’re able to enter into a space of exploration.

And of course, this requires trust and some degree of openness. We come to this place gradually, it seems. That felt sense of understanding something of the other – and of being understand. Collaborative creativity doesn’t always require ‘like minds’, but it does perhaps require some level of ‘fit’; pieces of different jigsaws coming together to create a new and often unexpected picture.

It sometimes amazes me that universities now are still able to foster such creativity. The performative and normative structures and metrics can feel to be acting in opposition to radical and creative practices. And yet, it’s the cracks of course, where the light shines through (to misquote Leonard Cohen). So, when positioning the pieces of different jigsaws which don’t quite fit, we adjust and learn to appreciate difference. And within those gaps, the cracks, that’s where the gold flows.

Photo: Oasis School of Human Relations, 2016

I’ve been reading recently about Kintsugi – the Japanese art of gluing broken objects and vessels together – but rather than hiding the cracks, filling them with gold, so the broken whole shows its scars and fractures. This creative gold is what makes collaboration so special – where the light has shone through and becomes part of the whole.

In coming to this place now, of being an academic and a student; writing for publication and for pleasure; writing into the cracks – this is where I want to mine for gold.

So, I’d like to meet you. To talk with you about your creativity. And how you carry this with you in your work and your life. And those Kintsugi moments of working with others.

J.Price8@uni.brighton.ac.uk
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mark-Price-13