Creatrix: she who makes

In order to create, we have to find ways to be comfortable in the void. This tends to involve keeping our bodies and hands busy whilst our psyche travels through this space, doing something that requires a degree of concentration: knitting, sewing, cleaning, sorting materials, exercising, driving…tasks that novelist Kate Atkinson describes as “mind

Our culture teaches us about Art as a commodity, and celebrity as something that goes along with it. It has little to teach about creativity, the lived process, the reality…

We can choose to ignore the man-made boundaries between ‘real work’ (work that is paid), heart-work (caring and nurturing) and soul-work (healing, ritual, sexuality and artmaking). We can do away with the artificial Western division between the spiritual and the mundane. We can merge performance with ceremony and visual art, healing with words and

We spend our time looking after others, attending to their needs, working hard, earning money. We do it consciously and unconsciously…not just because we have to, but because it is safer to.

For me creativity is an act of devotion, a path of extreme vulnerability, which has immense gifts both for me and for the world. It’s a kind of apprenticeship or discipleship to an unknown mistress, and it’s one that I feel very, very lucky to have.

With experience we learn that all projects, just like all births, have their own innate rhythm and that no matter how much we try to push and shove, some are slow-burns or simply need more time. This is why, as creatrixes, our deadlines must always be negotiated four ways: between ourselves, those we are creating for, the work and the creative Sour

We come from a long line of women whose creative needs have not been given the time and space they need to flourish. We have untold privileges and freedoms in comparison to our mothers and grandmothers, but still we have grown up not seeing women’s work exhibited amongst the Great Masters of Western culture, not reading works by our sisters in scho

I am aware that this means that parts of the book will make you uncomfortable too, depending on what has been suppressed in your own life and expression.

What defines a creatrix is less the sex of the body that a person was born into, but rather that they live in contact with that in our culture which has been designated the Feminine – the fluid and flowing – and devote themselves to bringing these qualities to birth through their bodies.