Guest blogger: John Holt is a published writer, art educationalist and founder of a national arts and mental health not for profit charity AiM (Artist in Mind). His publications include chapters for Yale University Press on art educational approaches to contemporary Native American Art, to works on racism in the arts, Outsider Art and on accounts of his own activism and philosophies of how art making, the creative process can heal and reconnect the fractured mind. Two of his pieces of artwork are currently in the collection and on display in the ceramic collection in Cannon Hall Museum

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“I am Rooted but I Flow……. (Virginia Woolf).

“There is Being that is all inclusive and that existed before Heaven and Earth

Calm, indeed and immaterial! It is alone and changeless!

All creation flows from it and returns to it. It is the world’s mother.

I cannot define it but will call it Tao” The Mother of All.”. Tao Te Ching. The Book of the Way,

Over many years in the arts, as teacher in mainstream education and as an arts facilitator in the field of mental health I developed the concept that “creativity is the immune system of the mind and the source of the mythic”, that creativity has a natural tendency, an inclination, when stimulated and encouraged in the individual towards a heightened sense of “self-realisation”, of “awareness of self”. This is, I believe a process of the clarification of the relationship between self and the world, (e.g. self and body, self and environment, self and the other etc.), and that this need manifests openly, given the chance, in diverse ways through the construction of language and symbols. As American academic, artist and art therapist Sean McNiff observes in his book Art as Healing”, “Whenever illness is associated with loss of soul, the arts emerge spontaneously as remedies, soul medicine.” Shaun McNiff. Art and Medicine.

 

 

After my many years of working for the Arts Council, teaching in schools, colleges (including Bretton Hall College), and Universities I left formal education in 1999 to establish a major arts and mental health charity entitled AiM (Artists in Mind) in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. I built AiM over 18 years from inception to a successful arts organisation with studios for people suffering acute and long term mental distress (mental illness). Working in psychiatric hospitals and prisons as a chaplain (Quaker) and arts facilitator I began to establish a repository for the artworks of people isolated by mental anguish and incarceration in hospitals, called “The Creative Archive”. (sadly this initiative failed due to lack of funding).

I continued to publish widely in the field of “creativity and health”, cultural identity and Outsider art a genre of art made by people marginalised by their health or social disposition.

After leaving AiM in 2012 I took a studio in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, England and began to search within my long abiding interests and developing theories in art and healing transformation by visually exploring notions of “flow and fluidity “as a more personal concept.  “Flow” as manifest physically in nature and psychologically and spiritually in the process, the mechanics of human creativity and the development of visual language.

This studio work (Flow art) was developed in my studio in Holmfirth into a series of large scale drawings, ceramic sculptures and in installations such as one in which I placed a series of seven ceramic sculptures into the flow of the fast flowing river Holme to draw attention to the cyclical nature of water and another working with a musician on an ongoing project entitled “Fragments of Lost Rivers” a multi- media project working with composer/musician Alex Monk which explored the constant loss of rivers and streams.  These works took on a Taoist dimension. Taoism teaches a person to flow with life and to me this working process was concerned with placing oneself into the flow of life through art, to manifest a “creative flow”. The idea that the construction of language was an antidote to psychic fracture and disconnection from self was continued in my studio, just as I had always espoused in my work with students, patients and users of mental health services over many years. These visual maps of “flowing” I made in my studio are indicators of a search for unity, of a psychic and a spiritual health and potentially of the true expression of one’s own nature. This work indicates the healing potential in the art process, and it celebrates the power and beauty of the nature and natural flow within us all.   

My work and thinking influenced as it is by, amongst others Carl Jung, and James Hillman (The Soul’s Code) and which included a whole raft, a visual typeface of symbols and symbolism drawn from timeless sources both cultural and temporal.

Artist In Residence

In July 2020 I was invited to take up the role of “Artist in Residence” at Creswell Crags Museum and Prehistoric Gorge in Nottinghamshire. In accepting on this position at the museum I developed an eclectic historical and archaeological, “magpie” attitude, introducing images and symbols from Ice Age, early prehistoric and Neolithic ages into my ceramic sculptures and drawings. Included within this new impetus was my ongoing interest in Taoism, Neolithic, Anglo Saxon, and Celtic art. I was now, it seems including Ice Age and medieval Apotropaic (Witch) marks from the walls of Creswell Caves into the mix of my Flow Art in a new construct of forms, textures, and images. I wanted to explore how the symbols and forms melded together, how they related, interacted and how they aesthetically and spiritually recited to one another and to us all.

This was not an archaeological or scholarly process, but more a visual exploration, a spiritual journey into the “creative flow”, into the beautiful aesthetic forms I had always celebrated in Neolithic, Celtic knot work, Anglo Saxon designs and Viking Art. It was a journey into myth and symbol. There is something about meaning and spiritual intent in all these past symbols, something I am drawn to and find incredibly satisfying on so many levels.

Always interested in the potential for art to heal, transform and clarify human life journeys my Flow Art then directs us in a spontaneous process towards an outcome grounded in nature as natural as the very flow of water, the stratification of rocks and the interplay of clouds.

As I have said my work can be seen particularly in relation to the Chinese philosophy of Taoism, which is a constant inspiration to me. The dynamic of yin and yang, of the interplay, of opposites, is a continuous aspect of my work. It could be said that my work comes into being by a fluid act of art making, actively spontaneous, fluent, and impulsive in its formation. Indicative of ancient carvings and mark making my work invokes a sense of openness to and a recalling of the natural world. It is about a connecting and a remembering.

And so my ongoing work resonates with the spirit of “flow and fluidity”. Flow which alludes to a whole range of phenomena including the natural, the psychic and the spiritual worlds. My interest in “flow” relates to my immersion in the flow of creative thought and its influence on health, happiness, and wellbeing, psychological and physical. 

Work On Display at Cannon Hall Museum, 2024

This large ceramic sculpture in Cannon Hall was made to reignite the power and beauty of ancient “art” and symbolism in a “visual poem” brought together in a free contemporary way. Sitting Ice Age, Neolithic and Apotropaic (Medieval so-called Witch Marks) presents us with a screen of the past infused with, often lost and hidden meaning but powerful for all that.

The smaller, circular ceramic was influenced by my exploration of the pottery of The Beaker people. “Pottery is an example of how studying artefacts opens windows into past cultures. Around 4,500 years ago, a new, bell-shaped pottery style appeared in Iberia, in present-day Spain and Portugal. These ‘bell-beakers’ quickly spread across Europe, reaching Britain fewer than 100 years later. Archaeologists have been unsure whether the spread of Beaker pottery – and the culture associated with it – represented a large-scale migration of people or was simply due to the exchange of new cultures and ideas.” Natural History Museum.
The main symbol on the “Beaker” inspired work was that of the “ascending female form” which has fascinated me and features in so much of my recent ceramic art. Paul Pettitt from The University of Sheffield Department of Archaelogy strongly suggests they are symbolic representations of ascending female forms. Pettitt suggests, they are symbolic representations of women, an interpretation supported by parallels with art from Ice Age sites in Germany and Belgium. To me the “female symbol” seems to be flying, ascending from an earthly plane to a more celestial one.

“Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring.”. Carl Jung. C.W. 13, Para 129

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