Last week felt really powerful; participants were really focused on their artwork, so maybe I was expecting a similar experience this week!
The atmosphere felt completely different; the group was really busy, people turned up at different times, which meant I had to keep repeating what was happening, so there was a stop start feel to the group.Adding to this there was a lot of new group members who had not been before, so that meant explaining what the project was about.
This left me feeling frazzled! I`m sure this had an impact on the group members who were settled from the start. This made me think do I need to limit this kind of disruption? The group has a start and end time and this session made me wonder how much I should be keeping this boundary?
The ideal group situation where everyone comes on time every week just does not exist, so is it about limiting these disruptions or accepting them!? One of the things I love about creativity is you can socialise, whilst creating; you don`t need to go any deeper and the therapeutic value of creativity can still be at work.
We began the group with a very thoughtful writing exercise, (which in hindsight would have been better at the end!), this was to generate ideas and themes for their mantras. Group members who had experienced the ink and bleach moved on to explore working with other inks, acrylics and masking fluid, whilst new group members tried out the bleach. Beautiful things happened….
