From Thinking Through Drawing to Hope Booths

Presenting my current research at the Creativity, Care and the City event at Central Saint Martins — thank you to Kate Keara Pelen for the invitation and for her support and guidance in preparing my presentation, “From Thinking Through Drawing to Hope Booths” — it was great to stand alongside other amazing work.

I spoke about my context as an Academic Support lecturer on the University-wide offer, with a focus on new methods to develop ideas for projects, overcoming stuck-ness without feeling worthless, empowering students to find the courage to do their best work. Over the last decade teaching, I have gained insights into creativity, confidence, and flow, letting go of perfectionism, and embracing messy sketching.

When I began studies on the PgCert in 2020, my intention was to research my Thinking Through Drawing workshop, but my sister Andra had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer, and was keen to work on a personal project for her advocacy work. She asked me to do a Thinking Through Drawing workshop together with her, which became the start of our collaboration. We enjoyed our initial meetings so much we continued with the intention to spend precious time together and follow where conversation took us.

In November 2021, Andra suggested we attend an online conference on hope, she led me to see my work through this lens: hope as action (Gwinn & Hellman, 2018) or hope as an axe (Solnit, 2004) — “hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.”

After all the speakers presented, we went into breakout groups and my participants engaged in some quick sketching, testing out the Hope Booth, a speculative space for thinking through a question or to work on a current problem.

• https://www.arts.ac.uk/study-at-ual/post...