📚 inspiration station 🔮 wandering as a practice 🕵🏽♀️
for gusto and remembering
Welcome brilliant being. Hope you’re holding tight, or loose, or somewhere in-between with ease. Wanted to offer you a space to land which i hope might be useful at this time.
I’m (re)listening to Mariah Carey’s Infinity + Inseparable (sidenote - that was early - find my Mimi faves 🌈🍯🐑🍬💜🦋💕👡🎤🎶✨ playlist here).
It feels significant in this moment, a soundtrack for gathering my bits in a chequered picnic blanket to take along to market, nay, car boot sale (aka a “yard sale” in some places) for your perusal. Well, mine too, see, this little portal known as the ‘inspiration station’ has been a regular staple in my life, as long as i’ve been sending out regular ‘newsletters’* since 2010 or so.
*i use this term loosely as i hope my newsletter can be a free space of multi-way-connection and ponderings, more like a digital zine or library of field notes and curiosities and hope and practices of joy but hey, whatever label works!
But She (the ‘inspiration station’ that is) always existed in other forms throughout my life. Online, be it on my preferred portal of the time, Myspace (only up to 2005, latest 2006 because then it got weird and ruined, i said what i said), Bebo (wat?), Hi5 (remember her?), Flickr, Friends Reunited, LiveJournal and the pre-social-media-bulletinboards etc…as well as irl, via zines i made to chronicle my curiosities as long as i can remember.
I digress with intention, as want to honour all the ways we research, gather and select the stuff to take with us on the journey.
The inspiration, the giblets, the nuggets of joy or delight that serve as portals of possibility.
Help us remember.
Help us welcome a chuckle.
Help us take a different perspective.
Help reaffirm our mission when treading lonely paths.
Or simply exist just because.
For no other reason than to take an intentional pause.
To honour the curation process, sifting through and selecting what intrigues us, creating collections to bookmark a place in time and in feeling.
“I have learned that feeling matters, that feeling is an important and legitimate way of knowing” - adrienne maree brown from one of my fave’s Emergent Strategy 🌱
This living archive has been a tool which serves my life and work as a polymath artist and ‘creative’. A tool to practice following my hunches, searching for trinkets to share with you (and also enjoy myself, this has to coexist). Also a tool to ‘brainstorm’ something i can feel but want to bring to life, for example, when writing, i find it helpful to describe what i’m imagining and look for images to moodboard and ‘worldbuild’. In that process, something inevitably calls my attention, a funfact or learning moment to research, and suddenly i’m elbow deep in youtube with five Wikipedia pages and sub-site windows open to follow the trail.
I realise i’m making a case for wandering here, to some, procrastination, but i see this practice as an intentional meander. Other times, this collection of inspiration is conjured from coming across gems in daily life which i store like a squirrel, sometimes saying to myself as i save it “ahh, i hope they like that as much as i do…”. It feels selfish to keep it to myself. And as much as i am shy and still working on taking up space, this documenting of little snacks is my seedswap. Well, hopefully more of that (encouraging you to share your own inspo with me in the comments below!)
It seems a bit pompous perhaps, to speak of the ‘inspo station’ in this way, but i know how much joy i get from others selecting their offerings to share with the world and me, as much as i love selecting condiments to share with others. A diary of weird treats. It’s an exchange of energy and a window into someone’s life and brain, and this never gets boring. Sharing is caring.
…I think my passion for this practice might be rooted in growing up crawling around stacks of records, collections of strange oddities, curated worlds from subcultures that weren’t afforded space to be celebrated in the ‘mainstream’ (and they might not have wanted that anyway, at least not in a tokenised fashion). I have optimum respect for archivists, hobbyists and the curious creative collectors of this world, making libraries composed of what they enjoy, just because!
So for those of you who have ever enjoyed one of my ‘inspiration stations’, or had a little journey of exploration or surprise or delight, thank you. I love to hear from you always, so share something you found inspiring with me in the comments below. I look forward to seeing your bitz n’ bobz!