Dementia Positive

My Creativity
by John Killick
I have written poetry all my life, so this is a form of creativity that has always been necessary for me. When I began to work with people with dementia in 1993 it was natural to start making poems with individuals. Though I was not using my own words, I had developed ways of shaping language into expressive forms which I was able to adapt for the purpose. Of course I was aided by the metaphorical ways of speech which I identified in many of the people with whom I worked.

As part of my own processing of the experience I was going through I wrote my own poetry and prose, and here is an extract from a sequence titled ‘Dementia Diary’:

          MAKING CONTACT

          How is it that Tom,
          this Day Centre’s most resolute
          master of the monosyllabic negative,
          keeps on smiling and smiling
          and talking to me, so that
          when I leave he stands in the doorway
          waving and calling “Goodbye, John!
          Goodbye, John!” over and over
          until I am out of sight, and maybe
          even after, saying ‘Goodbye, John!
          Goodbye, John!’ in his mind?

Since my early twenties, at training college and afterwards in amateur societies, I took roles in various plays. When I was teaching in technical colleges I was able to further this activity by teaching drama. I went on courses to learn methods of improvisation. I then combined my literary and dramatic interests by writing plays for my students to perform. Early in 2006 I went on a ‘Timeslips’ course in Canada, which has enabled me to begin using improvisatory storytelling techniques in my dementia work.

The most recent of my creative enthusiasms has been photography. I took this up seriously about six years ago. Since then my camera has gone with me on my travels. I cannot claim to be technically proficient, and do not have any special equipment, but I am very interested in atmosphere and composition. I am particularly fascinated by landscape, but also by the close-up details of surface and texture. It is no accident that over the past three years my project at DSDC, University of Stirling has involved photography.

In the past eighteen months I have been collaborating with a remarkable young Scottish landscape artist, Alison McGill, on a book featuring her paintings and my specially written poems. You will soon be able to see an example on my writing website.

Rediscovering the creative
by Kate Allan
A little on the story of my creativity… Having spent my childhood mostly drawing (from imagination largely), I was considered artistic. I remember creating stories in my head around these drawings too. This activity was mainly supported at primary school, however art lessons at secondary school did not appeal to me. I was discouraged by average marks, largely gave up doing anything artistic (apart from taking pictures), and gradually stopped thinking of myself as being creative.

It was only years later when I met Claire Craig (occupational therapist, creative powerhouse and a wonderful ‘turning-point’ person) that things changed. I was in the midst of a period of ferocious writing activity when she showed me a piece of felt (fabric created through the natural tendency of wool fibres to lock together and shrink with heat and friction) made with a person with dementia in a long-term care setting.

Something happened in my brain. I have always loved colour, texture and textiles (I touch things in shops and in people’s houses), and the idea that one could make fabric through a simple process with endless possibilities for variation was incredibly exciting to me.

My first encounter with the process happened in Claire’s kitchen. Shortly afterwards we visited the supplier and I stocked up with wool and silk, a fascination of colour and texture. I looked at the wool all the way home on the train and started as soon as I got home. I haven’t stopped since. I make things to sell (on a very small scale) and also as presents, and wool and other fibres are everywhere in my home.

Feltmaking has been tremendously important to me as a totally nonverbal form of exploration and expression, and it has also been the main vehicle for me being able to expand my self-image to include creativity. Interests in other forms of textile art (including tapestry making, hand and machine embroidery, silk painting) have followed on from the initial falling-in-love-with-felt experience, but feltmaking remains my passion - and there are so many more permutations to explore! (One day I will get my own website (www.feltexperience.co.uk) on its feet!)

I now strongly believe that we are all have the capacity to be creative and that this is fundamentally good for us all. I take every opportunity I get to share this message with others and encourage them to try things out, and this has involved doing lots of workshops with people with dementia, staff and family carers.

Having been able to come to see creativity and me going together, I hope to embark on further adventures in the future. Perhaps I will dare to meet what I see as my biggest challenge - writing creatively. (Working with a poet is the a major bonus in this respect!)

Through all of the above I have become interested in learning more about how the creative process works for different people, and in particular how we can overcome the inhibitions which so often exist. In this regard, I have enjoyed the colourful and imperfection-affirming approach of Sark. See her website to find out more.