Welcome to the Creative Links Blog

In Jet's words...
It was great meeting up with the six other women who turned up this evening. And mega thanks to Ali for organising the room.
Amidst a lot of nibbles and drumming beats from downstairs, we began to get to know each other and what we think we want to do. We also did our first warming up creative writing and drawing exercise to get things started.

The main things that I got from this evening are that we would all like to do creative stuff together/interactively and feel more relaxed/liberated about our creativity. I think we all felt that we had nervousness about certain aspects of being creative, but that we would aim to make this as open a space as possible, so we could each discover our own ways of expressing ourselves within the group.  
We agreed that creativity could cover a whole spectrum of ‘arts’ including writing, drawing, painting, clay, wood, metal, jewellery, music, movement, textiles/fabric and that we might want to do a large project that uses a variety of media.
We agreed to book the space at the Arts Org on the first Monday of every month (except when that’s a public holiday, in which case it will be the second Monday), from 7-9pm. It’s a large room with chairs and trestle tables but also has space to move around and possibly create on a large scale. It’s only £12 an hour, so we each paid £4 this evening, which allows some money over for a materials kitty. Ali agreed to book the room and hopefully will ask about the possibility of storing any large piece/s of work we make.

We decided to call the group Creative Links and that it will be an open/fluid group, so women can come when they can/want to. The group will be whoever turns up each time. That also means the group is open to new women who’ve not yet expressed an interest. We thought it unlikely that more than 12 women would come on any one evening, which we felt was a good size and any larger might be a bit unmanageable. I would like to think that we can go with the flow on this and trust that the group will respond to large or small numbers in a creative way. 

Speaking of warming up, the room was a bit chilly, so you may want to make sure to wear warm clothes, although I would also like to suggest that we do some sort of physical warm-up before we begin next time, as I think it will help us to loosen up, especially if we’ve had a hard or uncreative or frustrating day. I have some ideas, but welcome ideas from everyone.

Looking forward to the next meeting at: 
Mon 6 December @ 7:00pm at the Arts Org on Station Street, Nottingham. 
http://www.theartorganisation.co.uk/taonottingham.html