When I think of working with mentors, I see top-down exchange. The tutor offers their knowledge and the student does their best to emulate.
It's one person with the answers and the other hoping the question hasn't changed in the interim.
In other words, it kinda works—until it doesn’t.
Expertise has limits. Perspectives grow stale.
Creativity is more about the search and discovery. Not that many of our experiences of art at school necessarily looked like that...
In recent months, I've enjoyed collaborating with artists and writers through both private and public projects. It’s made for prolific visual art and poetry, as well as fruitful exploration of methods and techniques.
The emoji that sums up the last few months for me? 🤯🤯🤯
Most recently, Joe Callender and I published our first collab where Joe provides a photograph and I provide a poem.
Here’s an audio reading of Un/Settled:
The other day, I put together a piece inspired by Shareece Williams. Not copying their style or incorporating deliberate elements, but working with certain vibes and letting them appear on the page (or screen in my digital situation!).
Nelly Bryce has been prompting on Poetry Pals for ages, and I enjoy rising to the challenge (you’ll have seen some here before). Similarly when Beth Kempton sends out one-word prompts for writing a poem in 10 minutes (I’ve also posted poetry from that on here), there's an enjoyable collaboration—from both the prompter and also from the growing group of people who post their attempts in a lengthy stream of responses.
Through these community-building events, I’ve got to know numerous amazing creative people. And the wheels keep on turning!
We're working together, building together, exploring together, learning together. Togethering together.
When it comes to art and other curious disciplines, the chance to learn from others for me to walk behind them is useful. But only up to a point. Instead, the chance to collaborate in new ways to bash skills and experiences together seems a much bigger win for both—indeed, all—of us.
We're all mentors, in a sideways learning way—peers swapping tricks and saying, “Oh, I like that!”. Not so much a teacher/student relationship, but two learners at respective points on their journey.
We won't find everyone gels with us. We may prefer to work alone. We can start thinking about which of our 'team' efforts are 'best' even when there aren't actually winners and losers.
So the process isn't always easy. But it's worth pursuing and finding what works for you.
You can even turn back to your finished work and have a meta-moment. When I finish a collage, I find new art and patterns within, as I post-process the image. When I write a poem, I think about a visual representation I could create.
Your past work can mentor your future self. Your future can learn from your past.
You can probably tell by now that I'm driven by a lot of this stuff! 😆
I asked AI about these small collaborations and mini-mentoring moments. It offered a reasonable point:
"Collab-lite: Not quite mentorship, not full collaboration. Just a creative handshake. Call it a gateway drug to trust."
AI loves metaphors…
I've had so many creative handshakes with fellow artists in recent months. The move to trust doesn't take long in most cases and the artistic mood is overwhelmingly friendly.
Duane Toops let me take a selection of his collage work and bring it together into another, single collage. There’s trust in that. Here’s the piece:
So I'm all for reaching out to other creative people to see where it goes. Every time a collaboration occurs, there’s potential for growth in at least one direction. Sometimes I'm more closely the teacher. Sometimes I'm more like the student.
But most times I'm both. As are they. I’m so thankful for the wisdom and kindness they’ve imparted. Sharing is growing!
And for all the exploration, discovery, and learning that we do, something else brilliant happens.
We have a lot of fun in the process.
P.S. You may have seen a lot of words that start with the letter C in this article. That’s typical for me. C-words seem to have followed me around my whole life. Over the coming months, I’ll introduce more about these words and the impact they’ve had. Also coming soon is a new podcast. The tongue-in-cheek title: “Surrounded by C-words” - And I’m guessing a tagline like, “Connections, Curiosity, Community & Courage in a sea of Cs”, just to ensure peeps that I’m not just being rude!
All of this resonates for me. Peer to peer collaborative connections are definitely the way to go. And I agree that mentorship is a fraught power dynamic. At my day job, I have a number of people that I am considered to mentor/coach but I tend to disavow those terms. I prefer to think of those relationships working best when they are reciprocal. I know that I am going to learn something in return.
I similarly reject “mastery” since it implies having no more to learn. I prefer being a perpetual amateur.
Love this phrase "Collab-lite"
Mentorship doesn't work from some people sometimes, but creativity always born through exploration itself ✨
Btw, let's connect!