What if a garden grew where you prayed?
Why annotations work / Cultivating creative and spiritual practice with seeded sacred objects | Spring 2023
Annotations can be just as helpful to the creative process as they are to research and reading comprehension. This project is an example of how I applied a common learning activity to my own practice: What are annotations and why do they work?
As a lifelong learner and neurodivergent nerd I’ve long avowed the benefits of handwritten notes. These notes pop up in my journal, in my work planner, and on random scraps of paper. Annotations contextualize this practice - they exist alongside the content we’re trying to learn and provide visual cues for how we’re learning, serving as helpful data about our learning, metacognition, and reflection processes. I would even argue that it’s a creative process as much as it is a learning activity, but I wonder: how frequently do artists annotate? How frequently do we think about the artistic process as deeply contextual and relational to our experiences and the content we are learning? I would encourage anyone wanting to do some deep learning and higher-order thinking to undertake reflection and annotation as part of their process too. This tips and tools page from UNC Chapel Hill’s Learning Center is a helpful introduction to the what, why, how of annotation.
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In this project I chronicle my creative process through journaling, photos, collages, and annotations. Referencing several sources, including Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, E.J. Coleman’s Creativity and Spirituality, and E.P. Clapp’s Participatory Creativity, I explored the connections between my spiritual, emotional, and cognitive self within the creative process. I created a series of seeded prayer objects to represent the power of intention and action in dialogue with an environment or space, eventually burying them in an act of creative destruction and nurture. As a gardener, I sought to connect art to something I love doing every day (tending to my garden) and a practice I want to do every day (prayer). One of these seeded objects was a prayer rug made from organic materials. By studying the artistic motifs in my everyday life I discovered an appreciation for prayer rugs in Islam as well as the importance of nourishment in both my spiritual and creative practice.
