For the fun and the flow of it
The importance of preserving your family's photographic record - but also of carving out time to experience 'flow' by creating just for the joy of it
I’ve been spending the past few days attempting to record a ‘life in pictures’ as we prepare to farewell a lost loved one. It was a challenging but special task to sort through the piles of old photo albums and random loose photos, and to request and collate cellphone pics of precious recent memories.
It’s been a reminder of how important it is to, if possible, organise photos and the memories they encapsulate (but also what a task it is to keep on top of doing that). And also a reminder of how much life is captured on photos, how many stories they tell - and how much meaning the most mundane ones take on as time changes. The ones that elicit the chuckles and the laughs even in a time of grief are the most everyday (and often far from flattering!) of candid captures.
I didn’t expect I would have time to create a newsletter today, but there is nothing more to be done now, and in the calm of the very early morning I saw the wonderful creations of our friends with the latest “Hear My Voice” collection (highlighted in the video below made by my creative collaborator Rachel - who has taken on so much extra work to help me out over this challenging week) and I wanted to share them.
It got me thinking about how I spend a lot of my time on the aforementioned organisation and documenting of ‘life in pictures’. For me, this involves regularly downloading photos from my phone and camera to folders organised by year, plus backing them up to various cloud/ online storage. Every month I make a page (or two) for a photobook-in-progress, summing up the highlights of the month. Every few years I print a thick physical book of all those chronological pages.
In the parlance of this week of funeral preparation, I guess that would count as an ‘act of service’ for my children and any future generations, and also for my older self.
But for my present self, I take time to create just for the pure fun of it. To experience the elusive sense of ‘flow’. To meditate on life and how I am experiencing it.
The Hear My Voice collections are created to do that (the latest is “Hear my Voice: Transforming”) and I was struck by the different approaches to using the creative assets within the collection, very different but hopefully still an exercise in experiencing ‘flow’ by creating.
Aly and AnnSofie took the hands on approach by printing out and cutting and pasting, harking back to childhood diversions in a way - with gorgeous results. These small treasures are not practical, documentary pages but their value is in the act and joy of creating.
You can also find flow and creative enjoyment by making digital pages, like these by Rachel:
And Aly who turns her hand to both:
Here’s the result of Carrie, San and Geraldine playing:
PS … while the focus of the HMV project is very much on expressing emotion through mixed media play, Gaelle shows it can also work with a more documentary approach:
Thanks for reading - and a huge thanks to Rachel and our friends for their support over this past week.
