Episode 7: Creativity & Grief: Nurture

10/12/21
The Growing Creative Podcast
S1E7: Creativity & Grief - Nurture

Jane Boutwell is an artist & creative coach based in Atlanta, Georgia. She loves to nurture and empower others to pursue their creative callings.

"I am an artist with an inquisitive mind, a heart connected to nature and a soul yearning towards God…a child of dirt and dance…a beauty bringing blessing writer… a poetic painter and potter.

Starting with mud pies as a child in the backyard, my creativity includes tactile, intuitive, and deeply-in-touch-with-nature ways of being in the world. I see myself as an apprentice in God’s art studio of the natural world that is full of metaphor, imprinted with the character of the Maker.

It is my passion to share the shimmering beauty and deep truths I find in the creative medium that seems most fitting. Those creative expressions include gardening, quilting, writing, painting, sketching, ceramics, dancing, creative coaching, podcasting, and family life with my husband and four children in Tucker/Atlanta, Georgia."

Join the email list to learn more about special offerings : https://www.janeboutwellstudio.com/contact
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Transcript

Today's podcast is in a different format instead of freely speaking. My thoughts, I'm reading something that I've written. I have been working on writing out the stories of artwork that I've made over the years that has come from a place of grief, whether it's my own grief or expressing an honoring a friend's grief. I find this to be something that's really important to me in my creative life,

because I think that when we don't let our griefs get expressed and seen they fester and they can grow a hardness inside of us, that can block our creativity. And I believe that creativity has a profound ability to allow us to work through and let the grief process and flow out of us. Also, artwork that's made about a certain type of grief has the ability to let someone else who suffered that same grief,

feel a deep sense of attunement. That's a word psychologist used to say, your grief is seen and known. You're not alone with it. I can echo the look of pain in your eyes and my eyes because I feeling this with you and helping carry this with you. Holding space for this. My hope is that the artwork that I've made around different areas of grief,

my offer attunement, and bring a healing self to those who have suffered similar griefs and heartaches. When I've been going through times of grief, there's a point where when I'm able to come to my creativity and make something, regardless of what the finished product is, that process of creatively expressing what I'm going through, can it can feel like coming to feast after feeling famished.

My hope is that maybe you'll feel the invitation to sit with something that has been grieving you and find let your body and your heart find a way to express it creatively. Oftentimes the ability to put words to our grief leaves us the way our brain works. It just separates that feeling of grief from the ability to put words there, Connect words to it.

So giving yourself the opportunity to express with clay or with paper and paint, whatever comes to mind, whatever feels right for your body, just a way to express and feel what you're feeling creatively. It can be an amazingly powerful experience. And I hope that today's episode might inspire you to take a look at that tool and make use of it in your own life.

You're listening to the growing creative podcast and I'm your host Jane Boutwell, I'm an artist and a creative coach. This is a space that will nurture your heart and empower you to pursue your creative calling, whatever that may be. I spent hours in the waiting room at the mammogram office. One check, wait for Results. There's a need for a better image.

Then another anxious quarter hours create by a masked to come into the ultrasound room. We need a closer look. I lay there with the machine that reminded me so much of those first checks of an early pregnancy. The anticipation, mostly excitement. This time, there is no excitement, only mounting anxiety. After a separate appointment with a specialist, I was told of the need to remove a milk duct from my breast and do a biopsy.

The way I tend to deal with any kind of stressful possibility is by doing a worst case scenario map. In my mind, I travel that road and see where the final destination is. I acquaint myself with it and then I can come back to where I am in time and space. Thankfully, I often do not need the worst case scenario, but there have been times that the worst case scenario took me by surprise.

And I guess it's my own way of trying to be prepared. As I faced my list of possibilities, I sank into a season of grief. That kind that makes you physically exhausted. Your brain is in a fog and you zone out every chance you can. After bingeing on Netflix during any free moments. I finally had the date for surgery and it approached the night before I had an hour to myself,

sitting out in a friend's driveway where he had plugged up our pottery wheels a few days before both of us had been art majors in college and after years of neglect and non-use, we finally pulled each of our storage weary, pottery wheels out for what we said would be a Throwdown throwing pottery together to the entertainment of all the kids in the neighborhood. Well,

I had a quiet hour in her driveway that summer evening, trying to face putting my body under the hands of a surgeon, allowing them to cut and reshape glue back together. This incredibly vulnerable place on my body. As I faced that certainty and that possibility of future loss of my breast, there was so much to hold so many associations. I felt a tendency to want to hunch my shoulders forward and keep this tender place on my chest protected as best I could.

But I chose to take a deep breath and stay vulnerable and alive in the moment face. What came knowing this tender vulnerable place, where I had nurtured my babies, where I'd faced intense pain through breastfeeding, a tongue tie, a child had left me scarred already. I knew what pain in this area was like. There were so many complications and contradictions of pleasure and pain experienced in this place,

but I was ready to do what must be done to take this next step. My hands were on the clay as it was spinning on the wheel. And I was thinking about all that. A woman's breast holds all her heart, holds my hands, formed a vessel and shaped it into a breast. I formed a nipple out of clay thinking how the surgeon would be reshaping and forming my own breasts.

The next day, I continued thinking of all the complicated nuances held inside this breast. I thought of the grief of so many women who had had breast cancer and had to lose their breasts to mastectomy the pressure. They must have felt to be so grateful for that surgery that can save their life from cancer. To the extent that perhaps they didn't feel the freedom to grieve the loss of this part of their body,

such a powerful tender part of a woman's body, a ransom that often must be paid to gain the possibility of life free from cancer. I thought of known experiences of my own and my friends who had met the challenge to breastfeed an infant, to give their tender nipple to the chomping mouth of the baby, to learn, to gather with a newborn, how on earth to do this thing that is required to keep them alive and growing beautiful endearing miraculous.

Yes, but it is very often a hot mess and a great challenge. Not to mention at times intensely painful the hours and hours, days worth of hours spent breastfeeding and nurturing, sharing this vulnerable place with your child, such a symbol for what parenting is exposing our vulnerable selves to our children, holding them and the tenderest ways and allowing our rural hearts,

our children to now live on the outside of our body with free volition to go and do, as they choose all of these associations with this part of a woman's body. I knew making this one breast sculpture was not the end. I felt like this was a gift that could be shared with others, something to hold in our hands, to acknowledge that the struggles,

the journey, the griefs associated with the things our breasts go through. We're not alone. Those secret struggles are seen and worth honoring through artwork. The collection of nurture bulls grew out of that original vessel with the nipple lid. The original concept of a lidded vessel turned into bowls that are open to show what's on the inside mammary glands, looking like flowers,

blooming to give nourishment through milk lymph nodes, the rivers of detoxification and the lines that symbolize the musculature that gives strength. These three main elements paint a picture of my experience of womanhood and femininity. I'm one of four girls and most of my cousins are females. So I've certainly lived a life. That's been blessed with many women around. It's been an honor to make an art collection honoring womanhood and femininity.

As I worked on the bulls, I had plenty of time to think about how the design elements are symbolic of deeper truths. The beautiful flower shaped mammary glands have the purpose of giving, providing, nurturing as women, even those who have not breastfed a baby. We have this ability to comfort with a softness, to nurture and provide a place in which people can feel safe and loved and a unique way.

But if we're always giving, giving, nurturing, pouring out that can lead us to feel resentful. We can hold onto those hurts and those places where we've been harmed. One thing that I've certainly been learning on my own personal journey has been to see how important it is to have the balance of the nurturing and giving that is symbolized by the mammary glands,

with what the lymph nodes symbolize. The lymph nodes are part of our body's detox system. They look like rivers and tributaries, and it's so important for our health to keep them flowing things like exercise, keep the lymph moving and flowing in our body. As I've been thinking about them, symbolically in this collection, I've been considering how important it is to let go and let things move through when we're hurt and we hold resentment,

it can block us up and hold toxins inside our emotional heart and even our physical body. As I've read that some of the people who have been researching cancer feel like we can hold onto negative feelings and get a buildup of toxins in our bodies. Any toxins in our bodies that are not flowing out and detoxing can lead to cancer developing. I'm not a doctor,

but these things resonate with the truth that I've found in my own heart. As I've been walking through emotional healing, when I was holding on to the hurt and resentment that I had felt it blocked me up and made me less healthy as I've been learning to grieve those things and then forgive and let go of the resentment, felt a deeper freedom that brings vitality,

having a healthy flowing lymph system physically and symbolically allows us to then come back to the nurturing and giving that the mammary glands represent from a place of health without resentment. The very artistic illusion to the musculature inside of the bulls represents the muscles in the breasts supporting and providing infrastructure. This brings to mind the incredible strength women have. I do not speak about feminine softness,

beauty, and sensitivity in a way that it all negates the rock solid strength of women. Women are the ones that have to push babies out of their bodies. Women are often the ones that are in the nitty gritty of caregiving, whether for children or parents at the end of life, cleaning messes that are unimaginable. Women are often the ones doing jobs that are not recognized,

not thanked and require intense resilience and strengths to carry about. Our world tends to objectify women. And all too often, women are discussed and valued for our outside beauty and provocative since duality all of the outside appeal of women. So I really loved that this collection emphasize the internal world and all the richness and depth of beauty strength and flow of life that's within women.

While the interior of the bowls holds the focus. I had to make a decision about how to finish the exterior surface of the bowls. One of the aspects that I love about creating ceramic art is the idea that someone is going to physically hold the piece, feel it, and interact with it in a tangible way. It delights me as an artist to have my hands on a piece of work and to know that someone else will echo this tach as they interact with the artwork.

So the thought of what it feels like to somebody is really important. And I couldn't imagine picking up something that's representing a breast and having it feel cold and glassy, which is what the finish of a glaze feels like. So the choice I made was to leave the outside of the vessel unglazed that gives a raw, earthy, tangible, feel, a texture that has a softness.

It also felt incredibly important to me to have the variety of lemon had represented. So I love that with clay. There's a variety of times. The ground in different locations will have a different makeup, therefore different colors. For example, for years, I've worked with a clay from near my hometown. LaSalla clay is named for a small town in Georgia,

where it comes from, and it fires to a terracotta orange color. Often use it for flower pots with faces on them for the outside of the bulls. I used slip, which is clay wet enough to be brushed on like paint and various skin toned colors of clay, regardless of how we appear on the outside. My hope is that this collection honors the struggles we face in our heart.

As we work through holding all that our journey of womanhood might bring. So this nurture collection to celebrate women who have harbored love and their breasts to honor the blood, sweat, and tears shed and the carrying and comforting of young ones and the nurturing of babies at their breast, and to grieve alongside those who have suffered harm in places of vulnerability and those who have said goodbye to their breasts,

to fight disease, these private battles are seen and honored. Thank you for spending your time with me today, listening to the podcast. If you heard something that touched your heart, I hope that you'll share it with a friend the best way to stay in touch and find out about what's happening with the podcast or with my studio and the art that I make.

You can subscribe to my email newsletter through Jane Boutwell studio.com. I also offer free sketchbook resource that I love to share with people when they sign up for that, which is also on my website. I would love to hear from you and hear what you are learning from the podcast. What's peaked your curiosity. What you'd like to hear more of reach out to me on Instagram and my DMS or through the email or through review.

But I would love to hear back from you and make it more like a conversation. The show notes are available to help you find a transcript or a link to anything that was mentioned in the podcast today. I always love to help you find ways to dive deeper and learn more. I'd like to thank shepherd Martin for sound editing and the music and the podcast is provided by sad Moses,

once again, thanks for joining me. I look forward to next time and keep growing creative.