The Paradoxes of Creativity

However, our world is also completely overrun by cloth. The fashion industry is a significantly polluting part of our industrial machine and uses inordinate amounts of water, releases gargantuan amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and has devastating effects on communities, and the lives and wellbeing of workers. Western people buy more clothes now and keep them for less long. Fashion trends change fast, and high-street shops and online retailers sell clothes for so cheap they are made to be worn no more than a handful of times. The combination of fibres that we use in our clothes are less hard-wearing and so they fall apart faster and release microfibres into the water with each wash. We’re throwing huge amounts of cloth into landfill, flooding ‘recycling’ facilities with unwearable fabric. Charity shops and recycling centres are overrun with donations and can’t sell much of what they receive as it’s too low quality to be re-worn.

We have the drive for self-expression; the desire to adorn ourselves with cloth, texture, colour and to connect with others through what we wear to find belonging. But this is set off against the desperate place we’ve taken that desire to. We’ve taken something that is basic, creative and essential about ourselves and exaggerated it to an extreme where it’s distorted, destructive and incredibly damaging to all life. It exists as a prime example of the discomfort of our modern world, of the predicament we find ourselves in, of grappling with both the beauty and violence of human nature.

This paradox, our love of cloth, fashion and the meaning that we give the clothes in our lives versus the heart-aching scale of destruction and over-consumption of the fashion industry is nestled in the heart of my creative practice. There’s something about this extreme and uncomfortable paradox that really interests me and acts as a motor for my creativity. The tension between such tenderness and such destruction feels emblematic of the times we’re in and an opportunity for self-reflection; to explore and hold how multiple truths might exist at once, even within ourselves.

I do not propose that I can offer some solution to this insanity: upcycling or wearing second-hand is not any kind of solution to the problem, but it is a way to minimise our impact and to question the default raging fashion machine. It’s a way to engage, to explore and experiment without adding more demand to the production line. I heard that there are enough clothes currently on the planet right now to clothe the next six generations. We don’t need new ones. So, I rework and make clothes and other textiles and teach others to do so too. I add panels, change the shape, colour or add texture or prints to second hand clothes. I make installations for events using pre-owned fabrics. I also collaborate with individuals or groups to create celebration garments and quilts for weddings, babies, or other landmark moments in people’s lives. I love to experiment with lino printing, cyanotype, natural dying and embroidery and I attempt to work almost exclusively on commission with pre-owned fabrics, so I am not making stuff that nobody wants out of materials we can’t afford to create.

I love making – it’s something I have done since I was a small child. When I have periods without making things I don’t feel as well in my soul. I need to take time to let complicated feelings and thoughts filter through my body and into a physical thing, through stitches and prints. To push a needle through cloth – to make something slowly feels like a meditation, like a dedication to being here, right now.

This is one of the gifts of making creative work with the hands: a reminder when I have lost myself in my the mind, and have disappeared into fears or existential thoughts, that the practice of stitching actually creates something in the world, shows me that I am an agent of change, an animal able to impress my desire on the world around me. I can have an idea and then take action to realise it into a physical object in front of me. It’s a simple concept, and yet immensely profound for me. I am just starting to teach mending in my community and have already been so impacted by the joy and empowerment that can come from learning to mend one’s own clothes.

For me this process of making is medicine when faced with the reality of the converging crises of our times and the powerlessness that can come with that. And yet, it’s a tricky line to balance on: to grapple with our relative power and also our insignificance. It’s the stuff of spiritual practice. The sewing helps me to feel the size of myself, that I can mend things, useful things. It shows me that ideas aren’t everything, that material existence is far more real than the screen world, that creation takes time and energy and patience. It’s the balance between inspiration and humility: how an idea becomes reality.

Being creative or making are in a sense a very human hunt for dopamine. The same as foraging, or building a home, it is a desire to experience that chemical satisfaction. Ever tried ticking something off a to-do list? We create systems of our own and say, I will be the one who decides what and how I want to create. I will set myself my own criteria to say whether it is finished and then when it is, I will give myself a load of enjoyable brain chemicals as a reward. It’s basic and wonderful and is itself empowering.

I have in the past professed process over product and been an advocate for being in the process of creativity without attachment to making something ‘good’. I am in reverence of the therapeutic benefits of making something slowly with our hands and wholeheartedly reject productivity as a metric to value ourselves. But if I am truly honest, if there was no endpoint, I would not make things. I am, in fact, still very much attached to the product and the satisfaction that comes with that. There are far worse ways to hunt for dopamine, but I’m not going to pretend it’s not part of why I make things. I’m not just counting prayer beads, or creating sand paintings that I then wipe away. What’s keeping me gripped in the process of creation is the anticipation of completion. So although I really want to be all about the process, to be present and meditative and unattached, I feel here I am declaring that I, like many of us, also deeply care about things. And further, sometimes that love of things, and of making things, leaves me feeling a little uneasy: a suspicion that at least some of it is the result of living in capitalism. How do we distinguish between the healthy dopamine hunting that our brains are wired for, and the excessive overconsumption of our culture?

Creativity requires breakdown in the same way that life requires death. We seem trapped in a cycle of industrial production that has forgotten about the death part – the breaking down, the re-absorption. Our materials epitomise this: nylon, polyester and acrylic are plastics and they don’t break down, so the fibres we’re making last forever, but ironically the clothes we make from them don’t last long at all.

I wonder about my own role in the pattern. As an improviser, if I have to know exactly what I am doing before I start, I will never start. I wholeheartedly believe that working it out as I go along is a radical alternative to a civilization that brainwashes us to feel that we should already know what we’re doing. And at the same time, being creative in an improvised way inherently results in mistakes, or practice pieces that are more stuff than we can cope with. I wonder perhaps, if I only had local, natural fibres to play with (materials that would easily return to the earth and that I was more connected to the production of), I might feel very differently about this approach. Maybe the materials would be so precious that I’d take more care in the creative process? Or maybe the mistakes wouldn’t be so costly as they could just break down naturally anyway?

For now, I am living a microcosm of the larger problem in my own studio; everybody has things they no longer need, so I have a constantly growing pile of donated materials on top of my own old projects. I hope to re-work, upcycle, to digest and re-absorb the materials into the creative process but with no real way to allow them to die or breakdown, all I can do is move them around.

‘Upcycling’ means taking materials of little ‘value’ and making something from them that has more ‘value’, like creating art or crafts from trash. However, I recently learned about ‘downcycling’, which happens when we attempt to upcycle but instead create something that accidentally has less value, either economically or in its usefulness. It can also happen that we take something that could have been reused or recycled and change it in ways that means it no longer can be. This paradox is rife in our well-intentioned attempts to slow the torrent of trash headed for landfill or the ocean.

In my piece ‘Re-treading: ​​Circular Consumption and the Philosophy of Upcycling’ published in Dark Mountain 8: Têchné, I explained and celebrated the freedom that using waste products gave me in being able to explore and experiment. As I read that piece now, I still agree with all I said then, especially:

I hope that I can avoid downcycling and continue to give something that might otherwise go straight to landfill an extended life, making it beautiful, useful, and even loved for a bit longer! But while we’re working with a system that creates product that doesn’t break down on such a huge scale, it feels naive or arrogant to try to separate myself from it. So I will use the blended fibres and try to keep them in circulation for a while longer to get their full use out of them.

There’s a certain risk of virtue-signalling that can come from professing that you use recycled materials as an artist or craftsperson but I don’t want to present my craft as though it’s virtuous, hence writing about my creative process in this way. It’s far too simple to say, we need to reuse our waste. It’s a sticking plaster. The consumptive culture lives inside me, living as aesthetics and tastes, combined with materials and trends: my desire to be stylish, up to date, to make things that people like, to make new things constantly. Like the animals with plastic in their bellies, modernity is woven into the fabric of my being – there’s no point denying it. And at the same time, beauty matters, connection matters, creativity feels good, taste is an important facet of expressing our humanity and making helps process the enormity of our predicament. It’s all true. We live in the paradoxes.

More of Ava Osbiston’s textiles art can be found at avaosbiston.net

Dark Mountain: Issue 25

Our Spring 2024 issue is an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights, and by the living land itself.

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