Art & Design Archives

2022-HOPE for what is possible

January 3, 2022 by Heather Filed Under: Creative process, Inspiration & Education, Planning & Goals, Productivity, Uncategorized, Wellness & Mindset Leave a Comment

The beginning of a new year fills me with HOPE for what is possible.

My word for 2021 was Possibility. In 2021, possibility felt like an opening, and an invitation to release my grip on expectations. There is no failure, there is only what is possible!

Not everything I envisioned came to be, but I was conscious that I had and have a choice to pursue or release whatever possibilities come across my path.

Possibilities are limitless.
Possibilities are an invitation.
Possibilities are the seed of the future.

Reflecting on the past DECADE of my practice of selecting a WOTY, here are some of my previous words. I love how they connect and flow into one another.

2011: CLARITY
2012: SOAR
2013: RADIANT
2014: PLAY
2015: CHOICE
2016: HARMONY
2017: ACCEPTANCE
2018: FEARLESS
2019: INTENTION
2020: INTEGRATION
2021: POSSIBILITY

2022: HOPE

Hope is one of the three ethical Christian virtues, along with faith and charity. Although this is not what drew me to the word, my choice for hope is an expansion of the possibilities of 2021. Hope is related to faith, and trust. It may for some, require those qualities, yet it is an expectation.

With hope, I envision something better-I give myself permission to dream again, to invite, to anticipate, to DESIRE.

Word Cloud Created with Thinkmap: https://www.visualthesaurus.com/

Hope is a Promise and an Invitation, an Outlook, and a State of Mind.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the word of the year process (WOTY). Hit reply and let me know your word (s)?

Fuzzy Goals-Smarter than SMART?

December 9, 2021 by Heather Filed Under: Art & Design, Home, Inspiration & Education, Organize, Wellness & Mindset Leave a Comment

Recently, I learned about Fuzzy Goals!

I have been so accustomed to SMART Goals I had never heard of this contrasting term.

But, I liked the sound of it enough to do a little research. I think of Fuzzy goals as a spectrum.

Fuzzy Goals: A different strategy for goal setting

At one end there is a quantifiable goal (such as a SMART Goal) and at the other end, there is something vague you might wish for but have no idea how to achieve. At this end of the spectrum, there might be an emotional or intuitive feeling that motivates you to act in a certain way and gives you a sense of purpose.

They land somewhere on the spectrum I describe above and you can work through them using the following tips.
They align with your sense of passion or purpose, giving you an emotionally compelling feeling that motivates you.

Fuzzy Goals consist of several elements

They are sensory, they elicit a visual or imaginary reaction that gives you something concrete to recreate.

You can enact these sensory components by drawing, mapping, or collaging your ideas, dictating them into a voice recorder, singing them, writing them in poetry, whatever creative sensory expression that helps you get your ideas flowing.

They can change due to their nature of being fuzzy- they may shapeshift or morph from what your original vision was into something slightly different, and that’s okay!

Think of fuzzy goals as progress over perfection. Perhaps what is perfect is not what you originally envisioned and that the outcome might be even better than what you could imagine.

This might be just the right thing to explore if you’re struggling with goals, now or in the future.

I love the creative, flexible, forgiving nature of fuzzy goals. Sometimes you just can’t force clarity and there is no sense in trying to, but that does not mean you have to remain stuck or paralyzed.

Please let me know what you think of using Fuzzy goals for planning your future!

The Sacred Space of Home

October 6, 2021 by Heather Filed Under: Art & Design, Home, Inspiration & Education, Organize, Wellness & Mindset 2 Comments

This is the time of year that I find myself craving the sacred space of home. How about you? Even while the weather can not make up it’s mind which seasion it wants to be, my attention begins to turn inward. I’m happy for rainy cooler weather when I can stay inside, wrapped up with a blanket and a book, knitting and a movie or cooking in my kitchen.

Lets dive into cultivate the practice of creating the sacred space of home.

Each of us needs to define what makes a place home. I invite you to explore all of your senses.

How does home feel? Cool, warm, dry, soft, cozy, clear, cluttered, bohemian, calm, energetic, loving, nurturing etc…

What does home look like? Is it colorful, minimalist, bright and sunny, eclectic, sentimental?

What are the smells of home? Fresh, like baking or cooking, do you use aromatherapy, candles, what scents do you love?

What do you hear? Children playing, birds singing, trains, pets talking, traffic, sirens, the school nearby, filled with music, stop and notice.

What do you taste? Does home mean homecooked meals and nurturing food or are you happy to have coffee and grab something elsewhere.

Each of our senses invite us to explore what makes home meaningful for us.

Through the journey of our senses we come to notice the objects, the light, the people, the smells, the memories that we create and evoke when we cultivate home as a sacred space.

When our homes are overly cluttered, overflowing with so much stimulation that we begin to feel crowded out and confused, we need to re-connect with how we want our homes to feel. I invite you to take some time before the holiday season to get clear about what defines the sacred space of home for you. Spend some time clearing out or at least packing away what no longer feels sacred. Life can become so busy and overwhelmed with obligations, we frequently turn away or ignore things that no longer serve our lives.

The popular books The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy by Marie Kondo have become quite popular over the last several years. I personally think it is because Marie hit on this idea of sacred space and sacred objects in our home. She invites us to hold and gather our objects to determine if they “Spark Joy”. At the root of what she is cultivating is the process of reconnecting with our life as sacred!

The things we invite into our home and our lives should express who we truly want to be but so often we settle for less.

How sad is that? Having spent so much time in our homes over the past year and a half, have you created a sacred space for yourself and family? Have you cleared out clutter and celebrated the sacred through objects that have meaning? Special mementos and objects carry energy and I certainly want to be cultivating a practice of surrounding myself with what feels sacred, meaningful, has the least impact on our planet…things that are well designed and function beautifully!

What does Creating Sacred Space of Home mean for you?

Take some time to envision and intentionally edit out and create this space for yourself and your family to nurture you in everything you do.

I’m here to support you if your feeling overwhelmed, having a hard time envisioning your home as a sacred space or just need a fresh perspective and helping hands. If so, please let me know how I can help. We all deserve to feel supported and nurtured in our homes.

Got a Vision?

December 16, 2020 by Heather Filed Under: Art & Design, Creative process, Inspiration & Education, Planning & Goals, Productivity, Wellness & Mindset Leave a Comment

It’s been a challenging year and allowing ourselves to plan for the future still doesn’t quite feel natural. So for those of us use to planning, this state of uncertainty feels uncomfortable and possibly even scary. Yet, there are a lot of different ways to plan for the unknown. One way is to envision where you are headed. This type of planning is less rigid than sitting down with a calendar and deciding on goals, penciling in when you want to achieve them, and mapping out how to get there. A vision board is a wholly different kind of map.

Over the past five years, I’ve led quite a few vision board workshops at conferences, meetings, and art studio’s, one thing they always have in common, they are so much fun and unexpectedly powerful! Everyone from Oprah and Ellen to life coaches and artists uses vision boards as a creative tool to help gain clarity on setting intentions and goals. Have you created a vision board before?

When I create a vision board and lead a workshop I begin with helping you get clear about what you want to see happen in your life. Our imagination gets lazy and when that happens we sell our-self short of amazing possibilities! Imagine bigger, brighter, easier outcomes that are more joyful! Imagination is a muscle that requires regular exercise.

Think of making a vision board as a fun workout for your imagination!

The process of creating a vision board is a powerful tool for setting our intention and creatively visualizing that outcome. For some of us, these might be “goals.” For others, it might be an “intention” or a “feeling.” Through words and images, we can map our vision. This process helps us find clarity about what we are creating in our day-to-day lives through the choices we make. Our vision boards become a powerful touchstone to bring us back to our intentions when we feel we are off course or unclear.

When we get stuck or overwhelmed in the process of working through change in our lives, it can be refreshing to get out of our thinking mind and into our creative body. By asking ourselves what we want things to look like and how we want to feel, we embrace and tap into our creative connection with the universe, god, whatever that might mean to each of us.

So I am offering an online vision board workshop on Sunday, December 27th from 1-5 pm EST. It’s a pay what you can and I am inviting the first 12 people who sign up (here) to join me. If you can pay something (suggested $26), great but it’s not required. I want to see more powerful positivity manifested in 2021, this is my small contribution.

Even if you can’t join this time, I will offer the workshop again online soon. For those of you who want to do this on your own, the following instructions will get you going!

STEP 1: Gather : Flip through magazines and cut images and words that “speak to you”. Collect anything that delights or calls to you and have fun with the process.

STEP 2: Sort : If you run out of magazines or feel like you have “enough” begin to sort through setting things aside into three piles:

KEEP/LOVE!-These images and words feel right, bring you joy, you feel connected and they make your “heart sing”- trust your intuition.

MAYBE-These have an element that has attracted you but don’t quite excite you as others.

DISCARD- on second thought, something doesn’t feel quite right about these, it’s okay to put them away for later.

STEP 3: Arrange : Group images and words together as you begin to place them on your board. As you do this, you’ll get a sense of how the board should be laid out. You can follow a more aesthetic look or go about this in a random manner, there’s no right or wrong!

STEP 4: Attach : After you’ve arranged all the items in a way that works for you, paste everything onto the board. Take your time, attach smaller pieces to larger, think in layers.

STEP 5: Display : Hang your Vision Board in a prominent place where you’ll see it regularly, like the laundry room a closet, or inside a door.

The vision board process can help us find clarity and communicate our ideas in an effortless and creative way by tapping into our intentiohns, dreams, and envisioning them. The process doesn’t have to be exact or precise to work either! We can manifest how we want to feel, where we want to live or what we want our days to include. Vision boards can work in many areas of our life. I keep a small sketchbook that I create two-page spreads based on categories I dream about such as love relationships, home, travel (on hold for now;) and more.

Please give this a try and share your results with me if you like! Email me photo’s of your vision board or share via social media with #hkpscreativevisioning

Pursuing My Life’s Work

March 16, 2020 by Heather Filed Under: Art, Art & Design, Creative process, Inspiration & Education, Uncategorized 3 Comments

In pursuing my MA, I’ve come to understand that the work I am doing is my life’s work! It’s exciting to be in a place in time when you realize that all paths have led you to this moment, the perfect experiences and guidance that will help lead you forward to pursue your vision and dream. That is truly how I feel about this process and I want to share the blurb that was included in a recent school newsletter, highlighting myself and one of my cohorts. Since I am only 1 1/2 semesters into my masters, I don’t yet have my thesis declared but think of it like this diagram-a three-legged stool, with my research focused on each of the ‘legs’.

My research stems from observing and interacting with artists as they craft a space known as the studio. In this space, the work of making crafted objects takes place through a universal and personal creative cycle of order and chaos. History and contemporary culture have much to say about the mess and order of the creative process. Having spent nearly ten years evaluating and co-producing these spaces to identify and construct systems that support organization of material culture and productivity, my curiosity led me to interview over fifty artists about how they construct these spaces, their habitus, their process of setting up their studio and their interaction with objects and materials in their space.

I am curious to learn more about the legacy of objects and spaces left behind by artists. How can individuals and institutions support craftspeople in establishing helpful working guidelines for maintaining legacies of material knowledge and material culture? By drawing upon research in the domestic and workspace design fields, I hope to gain a better understanding of how our identities are defined by the spaces we craft, in both domestic and public artists’ studios.