Category: Creativity

When I am impatient,

I make.

When I am bored,

I design.

When I am frustrated,

I make it out.

Here is what I came up with yesterday.

I made a mitten pattern for a newborn and Miss Viviers is coming in winter.

Download from here;

new born mittens

I made up the pattern for this beanie, from a mix of stitches from this pattern. I am attempting the little jacket as well. Standby.

Ps- for those that have been asking, I am selling my crochet on a shop being featured by Green Couture for the month of July, including the Shwrap!

Gah, just a little excited and scared at the same time. My crochet friends, you may be given some work if the little miss comes early.

Makers gonna make

This year I can’t attend the SPARC conference. The last two years I have been involved in the creative direction of this event and this year I will have a brand new human to look after.

Yesterday I was asked to write for their blog in the lead up to the event, in line with the theme for this year. ‘To Venture on Wider Seas’.

Here is my article about social justice and creativity.

The Artist and the Activist

One hot morning in the bowels of Bangkok’s sprawling slum, I walked tentatively with a group of young artists to the make shift studio we had set up.

Our challenge for two weeks was to run a creative arts day camp with kids who lived under bridges, who sniffed glue before their tenth birthdays, who often walked drugs across borders and little boys who were prostituted out each night by their older siblings.

As we walked a rickety bridge, over steaming sewerage, we watched kids running down the alley ways excited about the new teachers in town and whispering that school over the next few weeks was going to be different.

Never before, had I been so starkly aware of the power of creativity to bring beauty amongst ashes, as I did that morning walking to class.

Sitting down in the photography studio, I listened intently as the hip hop classes started, the graffiti cans start to shake (teaching students how to tag shoes instead of walls), fashion classes begin with tie dying t-shirts and the day camp had begun.

We were teaching the photography and design students, with older kids sent off around the slum, cameras in hand that we had collected to be given as presents for the kids to use after we were gone.

The younger students in our class were getting their portraits taken today and we were printing photos for their parents as a present to take home to their make shift shacks.

In our over-shared, over-saturated worlds, we couldn’t fathom that parents of these students didn’t even have one photo of their child, no frames on the mantle piece, no moments captured and shared on instagram. They just had never had the opportunity.

My heart skipped a beat, as a three year old girl sat in front of me, piggy tales for days and a smile that could melt the coldest heart.

The interpreter sitting next to me whispered ‘A sex trafficker offered her mother $3,000 Australian dollars last week and her mother is considering her options.’

I clicked the shot and took as much care with printing the largest photo I could and framed it purposefully to give to her family. My heart sank knowing it might be the only photo that this family would ever have of their child.

The digital file of this girl still haunts me on my computer desktop. It reminds me on the days that I become a little flaky in my creativity, of the outrageous privilege I have had growing up in western society with every opportunity available to me.

How easy is it to think that we are the ones hard done by as creative artists?

I’m not paid enough, noticed enough, given enough, have enough of a platform…

Without these stories of perspective being told, it is easy to believe that we are the ones hard done by and indifference to a world that is broken and in bondage passes us by.

It is easy to fall into the pattern of indifference, where our creative pursuits and our desires are based in our own narcism rather than stretching ourselves to places where our craft becomes a weapon.

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” Elie Wiesel

Are you indifferent as an artist?

Are you so focussed on your own story, that you have lost sight of the one sitting in your neighbourhood that you walk past everyday?

As artists, we have the capacity and potential to become provocateurs that shock people from just being in a culture and not questioning its power.

Imagine if a generation of artists used their opportunities to change culture, imagine if a generation of musicians wrote so powerfully that nations were moved, imagine if writers sharpened their craft so that people were changed by the words they penned. Imagine if film makers told stories in such a way, that people walked away from cinemas indelibly different.

Imagine.

Imagine if we stopped comparing and competing amongst one another and used our skills to collaborate and bring a voice of strength and excellence.

I think the line between the artist and the activist is slowly growing dimmer and dimmer and that generation of communicators is rising.

A generation of provocateurs, who are more interested in telling another’s story, than finding a medium to vent their own.

Imagine.

The artist and the activist.

Interesting.

What if they were redefined as the same thing?

Let me introduce Bethany;

My friend, a young, passionate woman I have mentored and known personally for many years. The last two years have seen radical change in her life. She started a blog two years ago Not All Who Wander.

Capture readers have read her story here in many different ways, but today I have asked her to write a guest post about a real story, an everyday story from Greece, where she is working with women who have been trafficked into prostitution.

Her story is our story.

Be prepared to be wrecked.

 

 

 

For the past two months I have been in Greece working with churches and aide organisations. For the past two weeks I have been in Athens teaching English and documenting the stories of Refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

I am a story teller, a bower bird collector of human tales, a seeker of truth and I have been on a journey that has changed my life.

I have heard stories of boats being turned back to sea and people left to paddle with their shoes, I have met a teacher who has lost his whole family and remains on The Taliban’s wanted list for daring to bring education to village children in Pakistan, I have seen the scars left from bullet holes on a mans head who took shelter with an American soldier in Iraq.

I have cried. I have prayed. I have felt guilty for never caring to know. I have planned the ways I want to help. Ways to help when I get home, when I have more control over the variables. When it is safe.

Wednesday last week my time in Greece had come to an end, I was leaving the next day. I had my stories, I had my pictures, I would do with them what I could.

And then it happened, a woman, my friend walked in with a baby on her hip and told me there was one more girl who wanted to tell her story, I wasn’t prepared, I almost said no.

How could I have said no?

It was her birthday, 24 years old, a year younger than me; a refugee from Afghanistan who had travelled across three countries in the back of a truck with 17 other people, no food or water, and then boarded a boat to Greece.

Once in Greece her smuggler locked her in a room and told her he wouldn’t let her out until she gave him all her money (she had saved 16,000Euro), she was free’d into the streets of Greece with nothing.

Over the next five years her husband had formed a heroin addiction and left her with three children, two under the age of two. After he left she was kicked out of the room they were renting.

For 2 months she lived in a park with nothing but a blanket to call her own, she would often be arrested by police for living there and then released the next day completely unheard when she asked for help from them. She now lives in a basement room where her baby gets sick from the mould and she pays the same amount each month as a whole apartment would cost if she had the right tax number to rent herself.

She has no food and no money for diapers or baby things. To try and make rent she wakes up every day and searches through the trash from 5am, hoping to find things to sell. She does not make enough; she is racking up a debt to the owner; soon she will be kicked out again.

“When I ask people for help, the men tell me they will help me only if I do something for them.” she looked me in the eye.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

I understood. We were living in the red light district, more than ever, I understood.

“I heard that you were here and I have come to you because nobody else will help. Please can you help me?”

Without thinking I heard myself promising I would help her.

Three generous friends, a bunch of flowers, a hamper full of baby items, and a purse full of money later, and we stood singing her happy birthday.

“This is the best birthday I have ever had,” she said. I couldn’t fathom that either.

We swapped contact details and I watched her leave. I was completely wrecked. I had not done enough. I could never do enough. I get to walk away. I get to go home, she doesn’t. Her children don’t.

And so I didn’t.

Myself and six people from my team of 17 decided to cancel our flights and stay for 10 more days to make good on my promise to help.

Over the next two days we met with her twice and yesterday we went to see where she was living. We now know she wants to learn English and Greek so she can get a job and her children can get an education.

Tomorrow we are going to a real estate agent to find her an apartment and rent it for her so she can come to English and Greek lessons and not have to spend her days searching through the trash.

But the story does not end there. It does not end with her, it does not end with me, the story can continue with you. And so I will extend the same invitation to you that she originally extended to me.

“Will you help me?”

Renting a house requires more money than I have, and maybe more than you have, but it is not more than we have together.

You can be part of the story by donating below or by sharing this post and extending the invitation to your friends.

Smile often,

Bethany
Written June 9th 2014, Greece.

(Photo one of Beth by Ellie Youngs, Photo of Beth in Warehouse by Ely Terriquez, third Portrait photo by Kirsten Sejersen)

To all my readers here on Capture30days.com, you can contribute straight to this family’s situation today through Paypal and all monies will go straight into this situation.