Inspiration: a functional approach to creative practice.

14.4 Conclusions of the experiment

I conclude from this workshop that audiences, even those who are not artists, were receptive to a creative process once following a guidance to pay attention to inner activities. Once attention is drawn inward, and applied onto materials, participants were then creative and enthusiastic about their inner call, as much as any artist that I interviewed and read in the literature claims to be.

Once people paid attention to the initial stage of inspiration, they were then compelled to express it and create art, in the same way that my interviewees reported on the urge to create. No one participant was left without any ideas to create, or was not been inspired. All were able to write creatively, to draw or paint and to express themselves. This suggests that a creative urge lies within all people, yet artists simply acknowledge it.

An important observation that I noted is that participants looked really formal when participating in the guided journey. With their eyes closed they did not look on the outside as if something happens in the inside. However, their reflections suggested that a lot happened inside, which was evident also in their works. This observation, joins the conclusion of What is Love? experiment, affirming that on the outside people may seem formal, yet on the inside there is a lot of activity operating, which simply needs to be pointed out in a way that people realise it, becoming aware of it, and learning to use it.

This conclusion, in my view, shows that Foucault’s ‘death of the author’ and the critical literature’s notion of a separation of the inspired stage of art from the process of making art – are invalid. My experiment demonstrates that authorship and inspiration are both living though the art as it is made.