Fostering Creativity

Fostering Creativity: Inviting the Spark

My belief in the power of creativity drives my engagements with people of all ages and backgrounds. Creativity is often maligned within UK educational policy as something extra, not the core. This shapes people in subtle ways, creating fear — fear of trying, fear of being wrong.

My instinct is to give people a way into creativity: a simple starting point that invites curiosity and questioning. Creativity supports self‑identity, offers space beyond daily constraints, and opens conversations. These experiences can improve wellbeing for both participant and facilitator.

Creativity Is an Innate Human Skill

My work focuses on building the conditions for people to respond directly to external input, where every perspective has value and where there is space to try without worrying about outcomes. For me, the outcome is the process — a shift that leaves someone feeling content, inspired, and more connected to themselves.

A trainee Art & Design teacher once said:
“What made a big difference was how he created such a safe and open space for us to share our own experiences and ideas. It felt like everyone’s voice was valued.”

Creating this kind of space helps people reconnect with what is often honed out of us: the simple act of noticing something, imagining an idea, and making it real. Everyone is creative; they just express it differently.

Creativity as a Way of Perceiving the World

Creativity sits where different ways of thinking meet. It is a response to seeing something and trying to make sense of it. My focus is on bringing together creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, communication, and collaboration — tools that help people observe, question, and find patterns that create meaning.

The world is a never‑ending source of inspiration, extremes, and emotion. Creativity becomes the lens through which a person finds meaning and becomes more open and responsive to their sense of being.

Creativity Supports Wellbeing and Aids Connection

Creative activities can be psychologically safe spaces where risk‑taking and questioning feel possible. This echoes childhood play — experimenting, exploring, discovering. That feeling can be recreated, helping people feel they’ve achieved something, however small it may seem.

Shared creative experiences amplify these benefits. Community‑minded spaces allow open, honest conversations, whether learning a new skill together or connecting through memory.

The creativity workshops I manage as part of Lady Bay Arts embody this. Three artists work with small groups, offering introductions to processes or opportunities to develop skills further. Feedback consistently highlights the safe, inspiring environment and the sense of achievement people leave with, regardless of their creative background.

Providing Entry Points into Creativity

My person‑centred approach begins with small, accessible activities that gently unlock creativity. With young people, I designed a mascot challenge where teams created a creature that represented them. The brief was open but held by light boundaries — a real animal, an extinct animal, or something magical — giving structure without limiting imagination. The message is simple: they have communicated, collaborated, and creatively responded to a brief. They are already creative makers.

I offer enough input to spark ideas while leaving space for interpretation. Closed exercises can narrow what participants feel able to explore, so I design prompts that encourage curiosity rather than correctness.

Creating Space for Exploration

While running a making programme at the Museum of Making in Derby, I used the open‑access collections as a catalyst for creativity. Instead of directing people through a trail, I invited them simply to experience the objects. This created space to notice, reflect, and recognise themselves or others in what they saw. Hundreds of years of making history offered points of connection that opened minds to possibility.

After this gentle exploration, teams selected an object to spend more time with. Because they had already wandered freely, this choice felt grounded and safe. Activities then encouraged them to inhabit their chosen object — to consider what it represented, whether outdated, polluting, pioneering, or something else entirely. This led into reimagining the object for the modern world and developing prototypes that could contribute to addressing the climate crisis.

Being person‑centred is critical because it encourages empathy at every stage. In another exercise, I asked trainee art and design teachers to design a workspace for a pupil with special educational needs and disabilities, or for a pupil with English as a second language. The brief was intentionally simple. Their initial uncertainty mirrored the experiences of the young people they were designing for. When the spaces were complete, I modelled being the pupil. By not behaving predictably, I demonstrated why understanding the individual is essential — and why creativity begins with empathy.

Nurturing Creative Confidence

I am currently developing a Kids Creative Exploration Club for ages ten and up, designed to build creative skills through a gradual, confidence‑building process. The first exercise mirrors my own early creative journey. The “visual dictionary” begins with free, diverse mark making, then simple structures that connect the marks, and finally a folding book that gathers these marks into something uniquely theirs. By starting small and ending with something tactile and visually rich, I hope to show that creativity is already within them — waiting for space, attention, and permission to grow.

Holding Space for the Creative Self

Fostering creativity is ultimately about opening doors — to ideas, to confidence, to connection. When people are given space to begin gently, explore openly, and empathise deeply, they start to trust their own ways of seeing and making. That trust ripples outward, shaping how they relate to others and how they understand themselves. Creativity becomes more than an activity; it becomes a way of being — a lens through which meaning is made, relationships are strengthened, and new possibilities emerge. My role is simply to hold that space with care, so that each person can rediscover the spark that has always been theirs.