RETHINKING CREATIVE PRACTICE THROUGH EMBODIED PARTICIPATION

For a long time, I thought as an illustrator, it was mostly about the creative outcomes. Connecting with the audience through the brief itself.

-              Ideas

-              Experiment

-              Propose to client

-              Problem solve and negotiate

-              Create and refine

-              Produce something visually resolved

But during my recent practice-led research project, I have started to question what actually happens during the process of making itself, particularly between conscious decision-making and instinctive response.

However, within this project I worked across an interdisciplinary practice and notices that some creative moments felt entirely controlled and intentional, whilst others seemed to emerge though interaction, movement, material resistance and sensory awareness.

Sometimes the strongest work appeared when I stopped trying to force it.

That tension became the starting point for developing what I now call the Relational Making Process.

Rather than seeing creativity as a straightforward linear workflow, the creative process explores a continual movement between 4 interconnected modes of making:

Transactional Making

The structured side of practice, whereby planning, composition, editing, refinement and conscious control are dominant. This is often the focal mode within professional creative industries where outcomes, deadlines and deliverables shape decision-making.

Relational Making

A mode centred around sensory awareness, affective resonance and embodied perception. Here, decisions, being emerging through atmosphere, gesture, texture, movement and the relationship between creator, material and environment rather than logic alone.

Interactional Encounter

The moment where the work becomes less fixed. Rather than imposing control onto the work, the process becomes collaborative and experiential. Meaning develops through participation, disruption, material negotiation and responsiveness.

Relational Meaning-Making

This is the point at which cognition, perception, sensory awareness and interaction begin to converge together.

Rather than meaning being imposed onto the work as a conscious predetermined output or afterwards, meaning emerges through the embodied process itself, shaped through the movement between intentional structure, relational awareness and interactional experience.

Throughout this research, I have found that the most effect and meaningful moments rarely emerged from one state independently. They appeared when theses modes remained fluid, interconnected and in continual negotiation with one another.

If meaning is shaped relationally through embodied interaction, then what actually allows certain creative encounters to feel emotionally significant or affective in the first place?

This had me exploring Meaning-making as an act of stimulating emotional intelligence.

Rather than treating emotional intelligence as something purely psychological or interpersonal, I became interested in how visual encounters themselves might encourage emotional awareness, reflection, sensory sensitivity and embodied response. I began to explore now only what we see, but how we physical and emotionally experience creative work.

The work stopped becoming about illustrating an idea and instead became about understanding how meaning emerges through participation. One of the most signification realisations through the process was understanding that creativity is not always purely cognitive, but a relational connection.

The Relational-Making Process and Meaning-making as an act of stimulation emotional intelligence continue to evolve through my ongoing interdisciplinary practice, but together they have fundamentally reshaped how I think about creativity. It is not simply about producing outcomes, but about embodying a relational and emotionally responsive process of interaction between body, material, environment and perception.