Why the weird title?

and

What comes to you when you hear the words ‘creative’ and ‘ageing’ together?

Last week 

we took a peek
at middle age artiness.

This week

we open a conversation about creativity in old age.

How do we get creative around the ageing process?

The good ship Arts and Health Australia
recently launched its Celebrate Creative Ageing conference in Sydney.

I had the good

fortune to be there.
We heard from luminaries.
We heard Anne Basting of Timeslips Creative Storytelling, Gary Glazner of the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, plus other guiding lights in what’s often perceived as the dark tunnel of elderhood. *

How to bring creativity to the table, the bedside, the walls, fabric, fibre and flesh of aged care?

How to infuse the system with creativity – from the top down and the inside out? There are some ah-mazing projects and approaches happening around the globe.

Creative Ageing is a movement. 

As an art therapist in aged care, this pleases me.

You can listen to a Radio National live broadcast from the conference here: Celebrate Creative Ageing.

Post conference, I was awash with thoughts and feelings.
I painted ‘Awash’.

Awash
watercolour, acrylic and new alphabet stamps – yay
Sally Swain © original art

I decided to create a picture from the Celebrate Creative Ageing conference program. This might help me assimilate the swirly stuff.

Celebrate Creative Ageing Sydney
Collage of program
Phase one
Sally Swain © original art

I struggled between wanting to do justice to the text in the program
and allowing the picture to emerge organically. 
A classic struggle…in creative process…in life…in ageing?

Celebrate Creative Ageing Sydney
A boat starts to appear.
Sally Swain © original art

Celebrate Creative Ageing Sydney
I can no longer ignore it. There are two women in this boat.
Sally Swain © original art

Oh. I thought.

These women look like witches.

And the boat is not a boat, but a claw-footed bath. The word ‘Speakers’ looks like ‘Speed’.

The witches speed slowly, as you do when in a bath in the harbour.
None of this is what I intended. It has simply appeared in the Art of Emergence. And I have to go with it. Hmm. Maybe the Creative process and the Ageing process have something in common here.

 

What do YOU do when a creation swerves off course from where you thought it was going?

 

I tone down the Harbour Bridge and Opera House so it looks less touristy. I add torn pieces of paper towel from the aged care facility I work in. The ubiquitous paper towel. Fragile yet strong.
I decide.  This is enough. This is finished.
Or is it?

Two Witches Speeding Slowly Across the Harbour in a Claw-Footed Bath
Sally Swain © original art

Interpretations, anyone?

and….

What does Creative Ageing mean to you? What might it look or sound like?

* Guiding lights at the Celebrate Creative Ageing Conference included my childhood best friend Margi, who made an appearance on this blog back in July’s ‘From Pog to Blog in Forty Years‘.