INTRODUCTION
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” – Agnès Varda
I believe that everyone has a story and that by sharing these stories, through thoughtful and captivating storytelling, we can positively impact people’s lives and the world. Sharing creates empathy and compassion, awareness and community. It helps us to grow and step outside of ourselves, find our place and understand our impact on the world: practices our current world desperately needs.
The Makers is the second installment of a wellness collection. My first book, Wild Kinship: Conversations with Conscious Entrepreneurs, explored the wellness of our planet through interviews with environmentally responsible small-business entrepreneurs. This book is about our mental and emotional health and features 26 diverse and talented artists. Together, we discuss the impact art and creative pursuits have on society and on the maker and consider how important creativity and self-expression are for our holistic wellbeing.
Wellness, to me, is about more than our bodies. It is about the body and the mind, the environment and the spirit. It’s about the connection and relationship I have with myself, my family and friends, and Mother Earth. It’s about freedom and empowerment, equality and community, exploration and mindfulness.
It is my hope that within these pages you will find inspiration and motivation to flex your own creative muscles. That you will take note of how it makes you feel to be creative and that you will become more mindful of the ways the arts and creative industries affect your daily life.
Maybe you will find a new or renewed appreciation for the artists in your community; you might stop to stare at a painting for a minute longer and let it wash over you, recognise how a good novel makes you feel, let a film transport you or the beauty of a flower move you.
From this mindfulness, you may begin to draw inspiration from the small or ‘mundane’ habits in your daily life and remember to watch the way the morning sun dances across the trees blowing in the breeze out your bedroom window, or hear the distant roar of the ocean on your commute. You might forget the to-do list and hear the cicadas singing instead. You might overhear kind words being spoken, smile to yourself and be reminded that we have all come from different places, with individual experiences, that we are all doing the best we can, and believe in the good in humanity. You might find kindness, compassion, beauty and a little bit of magic within our busy, noisy world.
I hope that you let these stories of hardship, adversity, vulnerability and courage empower you to let go of fear and chase the things that you love and that speak to you, so that they can give you purpose, fulfillment, contentment and happiness. That you will take a moment to salute the multitalented artists within these pages or the ones that you know. And that you will allow yourself the permission to tend to your own mental and emotional health, because being well is not a luxury; it is an absolute necessity.
– M. Hemmingson
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The insightful and moving book Lost Connections by Johann Hari was a catalyst for my writing this book. Serendipitously, it was introduced to me by my friend, the photographer Erin Cave, while we were travelling for the first book in this collection.
Having struggled personally with a tendency toward melancholy and a sort of sensitivity to the world, I was floored to learn how maladapted our societal understanding of mental health has become. Hari writes, ‘You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met.’ He speaks to the powerful and vastly underrated effect of loneliness and how without the ability to share and connect, we are lost. ‘Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people – it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else. [You may] have lots of people around you [but if you] don’t share anything that matters with them, then you’ll still be lonely.’
This idea kept playing on my mind. It reminded me how sharing – or, better yet, creating and sharing – art was a way to dig deeper, work through and express these emotions. And it was a way to get the connection and understanding that we as humans inherently need.
A year or so later, in line at a café, I started chatting to the man in front of me. We spoke about how during the height of the pandemic overseas, the arts community took a hit, even though what it offered was something society desperately needed during those hard times. I loved the depth of inquiry in a fleeting conversation with a stranger, and I loved how the topic continued to play on my mind afterwards. What is it about the arts that feeds us? I wondered. Why do we need it? What is its purpose?
I wanted to explore this idea more, to understand the impact art and creativity had on the individual making it and on society as a whole.
I found that it was an integral part of our overall wellbeing, which is what I set out to capture in this book, by going straight to the source.
This process cemented what I had found when writing my first book: practices that were beneficial for the wellbeing of our earth applied to us as individuals too. By finding mindfulness and awareness, community and connection, and by embracing slowness and softness, we can be healthier, happier people.
M.