Click Happy Summer Academy 2021
Week 5:
Bringing it home to Papatuanuku
Belt Levels - How far will you go during GUTS week?
White Belt
Yellow Belt
Orange Belt
Red Belt
Green Belt
Blue Belt
Composition:
Framing
A frame within a frame within a frame
Image Credit Ava Thomas
Framing
Framing is using elements in the images to create an interior framing of the subject within the image itself.
Photographic Challenge:
Curating a Photo Essay
If a picture paints a 1000 words then a juxtaposed photo essay probably paints 10000 words.
This week is all about bringing your ideas home. - Grounding
Have you ever heard of the hero’s journey? Think of Star Wars, or Harry Potter. The hero is busy living a normal life then there is a call to adventure. Obi Wan or Hagrid comes knocking on the door. Then they meet a mentor (Yoda or Dumbledore) learn some important things, and then get in over their head and have to figure stuff out, some how they succeed thanks to the training they received and then they have to bring their new knowledge back home to share with others. This is similar to what you have done here. You have received a call to adventure in the form of the scholarship. You didn’t have to take it but you did. You got a mentor and we trained together. You have been tested with challenges and difficult parts but you have carried on and grown as an artist this term. Now it is time for a bigger challenge. This week you will be taking all that you have learned and telling us the story of your Tūrangawaewae – a place to stand Where do you call home? What does home mean to you? This can be a traditional Tūrangawaewae of Mountain, River, Marae or Home or it can be the story of your town, or of your special sacred place, of your own tree of calm. We want to see what grounds you. What anchors you and makes you stronger for having it?
Curation
The bringing together of images to tell a story or showcase the work of an artist.
You can use older images that you have taken to create this image collection or you can take them all fresh. But ideally you want to tell the story of your sacred space, of the place that grounds you.
Curation uses all of the elements of composition that we have covered but they mix it up like a DJ that is combining beats and rhythms and songs but they do it visually.
Here is more about curating
Examples of Photo Essays
The Great Depression - Dorothea Lange
James Nachtwey - not a photo essay but an interview and imagery of one of the world’s best photojournalists (self taught) and a master of photo essay.
Photo Essay tips
A great article on how to create a Story essay
https://shorthand.com/the-craft/compiling-an-engaging-photo-essay/
The most important things that they mention is
But read it there is great content there.
How to Create a Photo Essay in 7 Steps
Before you get started, think about these questions: How are you going to make it all happen? What are the budgetary and schedule issues that you’ll have to overcome to make the assignment work? Once you have those answers, you can start working on a photo essay of your own. Here’s how to do it:
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-create-a-photo-essay#how-to-create-a-photo-essay-in-7-steps
Visual Poet of the Week Challenge
Challenge: 5 image photo essay that tells the story of your Tūrangawaewae. Your own grounding space. Any orientation that works to tell the story. Must include the Element: Earth in at least one of the images.
You can use your pads to create this series but you will probably need to shoot 100’s of images so that you can pick the best 5 to tell your Visual Essay.
Your Ground Brain
This is your body and its connection to Papatuanuku.
This is all about the Brain of balance and energetic connection.
The next section is a personal story about what it was like when I was ungrounded and my own personal journey to find ground and some tools that helped me along the way.
The reason I share it is because I believe without grounding our creativity is short changed. And I want your creative energy to be locked in and flowing well.
You can choose not to read it. Or you can choose to stay curious about what you could do to amp up your own creative powers.
Why is Grounding important in Creativity
We have all been there. We start something. Something gets in the way. We get overwhelmed and discouraged and we quit. But it looms in the back of our mind. Mind clutter. And it drains us of our creative energy. It becomes like a live wire that when you touch it, it zaps you.
Too many of these live wires make you become flakey in others eyes.
You start stuff but you don’t finish it. And others will stop wanting to work with you and you will eventually be ghosted out of cool situations. People doing awesome things in the world have usually developed the capacity to become completer finishers of what they start. And by so doing are offered even cooler opportunities. However if your track record and your word is wishy washy you will not be taken seriously for long no matter how talented you may be.
So it is important to take your cool ideas and then bring them to ground. Which means completing and finishing what you start. And choosing wisely what you do start because you will commit to finishing them.
The concept of grounding
In electronics if a circuit is live but it isn’t grounded it is dangerous. It has the potential to zap you. So too can ungrounded humans. Those who haven’t found their ground, either because they were never taught how to ground or who carry so much collective ungrounded trauma that they struggle to find their own means of letting it go. Their have yet to find a solid place to rest, recover, refill their cup…and therefore can become a liability. The modern world doesn’t leave much space for grounding so you literally have a bunch of live wires touching up against each other causing disharmony and chaos. But if you are grounded you can take the chaos and apply order to it.
But this means knowing yourself. Knowing your limits. Knowing what refills you.
Sometimes this is family. Sometimes they are a bunch of ungrounded live wires and it is important to find your own grounding space.
You can’t control others but you can choose to find your own ground and tend to your personal shorts. This is the only thing you actually do have control over in our often chaotic world. Your ability to choose your mindset and find what grounds you.
Why I know about Live Wires…
Several reasons. When I left High School I enlisted in the Navy. They trained me to be an electronics technician. Rule number one…make sure what you are working on is grounded otherwise you can become the ground. Electricity will seek out ground and can blow your electrical system in the process. That hurts badly (Ever touched an electric fence?) and depending on the level of current you have found…can kill you too.
I had joined the military as a way to “escape” from a family that I felt I was ill suited for. I was the step child, the other in the new family. In my family we had three different family lines of inherited unresolved traumas. I grew up being “zapped” by unexamined stuff that travelled down the family line. When I was a kid when I was “zapped” big time. I would run away to Eve, a tree that I had found by the river that was growing on an exposed rock. She had no business growing and thriving there with no obvious soil to hold her in place but she managed to make it work anyway. I related to her. I would sit with my back to her and cry and tell her what was bothering me while I looked down at the river. Between the two of them, the Chattahoochee river and Eve they washed away the pain and gave me strength and calm. They helped me find ground. They unflipped my lid (brought me to a state of neurological calm).
Electrical Tape for your creative soul
Over the years I developed my self-compassion, and as I began to understand myself better I was able to see the reflected pain in others more clearly and then could hold a space of compassion for them as well. This is called forgiveness and it acted like electrical tape that can cover the areas that are damaged and prone to shorting. (Shorting is when you have energy flowing but a live wire or metal touches the damaged unprotected parts and sucks the energy out of the system).
The combo of healing the damaged spots with self compassion, and continuing to find ways of connecting with ground enabled me to rebuild my energy tanks.
The more grounded I became the better I was at my creative pursuits because my energy wasn’t being shorted out all of the time. I was more selective in what i took on and i developed the grit to complete what I started…but this took time. And truth be told I am still learning each day how to better ground and sheath myself.
Whaea kuia Eve
Grounding involves connecting with something bigger than yourself. For me this has always been done in the company of Papatuanuku even when I was in the States and she was called Mother Nature.
As I have travelled the world I have sought out “Eve’s sisters”. Grounding spaces wherever I find myself. Right now I am supported by a fallen Great Grandmother Rimu tree with moss all over her that is so wide I can stretch out and lie on her up in Tane’s Track in the Rimutakas. She teaches me about life and death and humility and giving back to what once nurtured you. She teaches me about the importance of making space for others and nourishing the next generation. She grounds me. What grounds you?
Creative Self Care Challenge:
Finding your creative shorts
Love is the electrical tape of the soul.
Electrical Tape and Grounding
The more self aware you are the more intentional you can be as an artist and the more powerful your work becomes I believe.
I have experienced that when you are unconscious of your sore spots they act as live wires that can shock people and push them away. Remember the heart section two weeks ago. We discovered that we need others if we want to create our best work, and we need to be able to help them create their best work too. The more self aware you are the more you can help others and yourself. The less self aware you are the more shorts develop on your creative wiring.
My most powerful method for finding Ground
So you guessed it three more pages of writing where you explore this question… “Where am I a bit of a live wire? And what can I do to with compassion to start to protect myself and others from this raw spot?” (this is the electrical tape part) Self awareness is always the first step.
You are looking for times where you have “lost your nut” where someone did something and it “triggered” you and you got upset. Now what you do is look for what sits underneath that reaction. You can do this by uncovering the unmet need and then looking at alternative ways to get that need met…here is how.
Finding your Electrical tape
When you have explored your three pages of writing about something that tends to trigger you.
Get a fresh sheet of paper - Then go to your grey page and write down all of the emotions that this brought up for you.
Then you go to the Needs Cluster page
Now get a new sheet - After you have identified what emotions came up for you, you now go on a hunt for what needs where not being met that led to you feeling that way.
Write them at the top of the page.
Then you consciously choose how you want to feel
Now you go to the golden list and choose how you want to feel once your needs are met.
List them below the needs you discovered.
The 20 year old version of you
Now flip the page over and ask the 20 year older version of you (who knows you better than anyone and loves and cares for you and had deep compassion and empathy for what you are going through)…ask them what you can do to get your needs met without requiring someone else to change their behaviour. See what we are doing is getting our mana back. We have control over only one person in the world…that is ourselves. We cannot change another but we can change our attitudes and mindsets and actions. If someone is treating us poorly, then we use that behaviour as a trigger to do something for ourselves that helps us to meet that need in another supportive and compassionate way. For example.
Mandi’s Example of Electrical taping an unmet need
I had a friend who used to hurt my feelings by not coming to my birthday party because she had another friend who was “cooler” whose birthday was always on the same weekend. This made me feel rejected and disappointed, insecure in our friendship, and a bit envious (and this was me as an adult…). My needs for closeness, and to-matter, and security were being triggered here. So I had to make a call on how I responded to this. I tried to schedule something another weekend with just her but found that over time she became flakier and flakier…so instead I chose to find others who cared deeply for me, who wanted to be close to me and to whom I mattered very much. I chose to find better friends, eventually she just faded from my life but the new crew of friends were creative powerhouses that helped me grow and thrive alongside them. They make me feel cherished and adored as I cherished and adored them. I chose not to surround myself with those who didn’t meet my needs and whose needs I struggled to meet as well. This gave me my power back. This increased my mana. I didn’t try to change her. I worked on me instead.
The stickiness of our electrical tape.
So ask the 20 year older version of you what actions you can take to get back your mana where you are currently being triggered.
But here is the most important part. The Electrical tape that we apply over our shorts loses its stickiness if it is applied with judgement or harsh criticism. The stickiness only comes from love. From self compassion. When we are feeling raw this can be difficult to achieve so be patient with yourself. If we ask our current version of ourselves what to do we can often be harsh on ourselves. So ask the 20 year older version who is kind and compassionate.
Then create an image that represents what action you are planning on taking to “deshort” yourself. You don’t need to be in it. No one else has to know what it means. But take a photograph of something that represents “ I am __________________” Which is the future version of you that has healed that short.
Photo a Day Challenge
The Why of this week
We are all born with a load of cultural trauma that can drain us. I would say that close to 100% of our families have unexamined stuff that can “Zap” us from time to time. Our actions can develop “Karma” that can cause fraying of our protective grounding wire that channels our energy. The pathway from idea to manifestation is impacted by the number of shorts we carry around with us. Some not of our making, some of our making. Who made them is irrelevant. How we handle them is the most important part. By focusing on what you have control over - sheathing your shorts and finding your ground, you are able to increase the power that you have available for your creative process. Papatuanuku is a powerful ally here in helping you by grounding you, calming your nerves and helping you to recharge and find your balance. By becoming more self aware and actively protecting your energetic level you make sure that what you do create comes from a place of love and compassion instead of unconscious pain (which can lead to more trauma and karma).
Important Reminders and Links
All of the important links can be found on this webpage with the exception of your personal Telegram chat page which should be on the email that delivers this content to you.
Online safety - Revisited
How to Critique an Image that helps and doesn’t harm
Remember the rule of thumb.
For every one image you post. You give feedback on 5 images of others.
The better your feedback the better you learn as an artist as well.
Here is the link to the How to Grow Better Artists Through Compassionate Critique document.
It will feel clunky and not “authentic” or weird to give critiques like this, and much simpler to say “it's pretty” but that doesn’t actually help the photographer except to pet their ego. Which is fine but doesn’t improve their game. We are all about rapid feedback loops here. Shoot something. Get real feedback. Then shoot something better. And start again. This is how we grow. But we do it a special way so that we stay confident and curious and not crushed. So read that document and practice. You will feel weird at first but then you will start to improve. Ava Thomas one of the youth mentors has refined the art of giving detailed helpful feedback. See if you can tune into some of her feedback to get an idea of how it can be done. Or listen to how I give it and try and model it.
Copyright Notice
All Click Happy content is collectively owned by Mandi Lynn and Every Body is a Treasure Trust. Please contact Mandi or the trust if you wish to reproduce any of the materials that have been shared with you.
Mental Health Links
If doing any of the suggested activities has stirred up issues that feel too much for your mental health…here are some resources that can help https://themojolution.org/mental-health-help/