We Must Create

We Must Create — A First Call to Action.

I’m really chuffed to share that I’m now part of the wide and generous global community at wedotart. It’s prompted me to write from my base here in my London studio. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why making matters. Making as a creative expression, a way of grounding, connecting, and being well in a world that increasingly demands we “produce” value, impact, meaning, sustainability, and solutions all at once.

I have a mantra that keeps returning to me, it’s We Must Create, but it’s not just about art as a product, it’s about art as a kind of portal: a way into presence, connection, and collective imagination. And it isn’t limited to any one discipline. We Must Create is a call to everyone, whether through film, poetry, dance, painting, writing, singing, building, cooking, stitching, or drawing. The warp may be my canvas at the moment (aside from teaching and working with private clients on their homes), but creativity belongs to all of us. And for me, making permits us to think by doing, to slow down, to commune, and to let insight arise through our hands as much as through our minds.

Intuition aside, there is growing evidence that creative engagement has physiological benefits. For example, participatory visual art activities have been shown to significantly reduce full-day heart rate and cortisol levels, a beautiful proxy for better balance between stress and rest systems in the body. This was among older adults who participated in regular art-making sessions over three months (ref pmc). More broadly, creativity and cultural engagement are linked with improvements in wellbeing, life satisfaction, and emotional regulation in large population samples (ref Dr. Helen Keyes, The Guardian)

This embodied act of doing, feeling, and sensing echoes the wisdom of Joanna Macy’s work around cultivating Active Hope (ref. the book), Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, and Janine Benyus’s invitation to “learn from nature rather than extract from it.” Benyus reminds us that life has been solving problems for 3.8 billion years — and that by observing, making with, and learning from living systems, we begin to design not against the world, but in partnership with it.

Macy speaks of reconnecting with life at multiple scales, self, other, planet, and of turning toward what wants to emerge. Scharmer’s concept of presencing describes learning from the future as it emerges through our bodies and minds in dialogue and practice. These ideas materialise from the conditions that allow resilience, imagination, and agency to flourish.

I see this in the workshops I lead, whether in Dalston Curve Garden or elsewhere, when people settle into the act of making and suddenly something shifts: the worry relaxes, the mind opens, and a deeper kind of thinking emerges through the hands. Thinking by making isn’t escapism; it’s cognitive and emotional recalibration in the face of complexity and oftentimes burnout.

I know there’s so much more we could explore together, large collective weaving projects that bring people into shared making, architectural interventions in the street that invite civic communities to co-create, or a community-rooted series that combines reflection, action, and care. These are early thoughts, still not fully coherent, but I want to use this moment, now that I’m on wedotart.com, to begin weaving them together.

For me, making is a form of well-being and care for our bodies, our minds, each other, and the world we inhabit. It is a starting point for connection rather than a finished product. We Must Create is an invitation to practise art daily, to make connections and collaborations, and to find wellbeing through making and a collective practice.

If you are in London, come to the workshop in March, or get in touch with me here. #WeMustCreate!