Hasta La Ideas

Christina Crook has been a regular contributor in the pages of UPPERCASE magazine and we’re happy to welcome her to the blog this week with a special guest post series on the case for being creative offline. Christina recently unplugged from the internet for 31 days, typing a daily letter rather than posting to her blog, surfing the net or turning to the computer for distraction, entertainment and affirmation.

Please join us every morning this week as Christina introduces us to other creatives and their off-line habits.

Christina’s documentation of her off-line experiment, Letters from a Luddite: What I Learned in 31 Days Off-line, is available through Blurb. 

Space to Create:

The Case for the Off-line Creative

by Christina Crook

In January, after half a year’s consideration, I stepped off-line for an entire month. The time was filled with a flurry of inspiration. Books were read. Projects were completed. The cobwebs were swept from the inner recesses of my busy head. I chronicled the project with a letter a day, sharing the thoughts, ‘aha’s, and frustrations of my off-line existence.

We are little gods on the Internet, often presenting only the best of ourselves online. That’s what makes the Work-In-Progress-Society such a unusual and refreshing affair. Here makers from across the world celebrate their unfinishedness and champion one another on to completeness.

We all need space, physically and mentally, to create. A desk. A corner. For the lucky ones: bright, airy studios where we can set our hands to work. Increasingly though, our space is mediated, and often cluttered, by the online space of the Internet.

I thought would be interesting to consider the on- and off-line habits of a few members of the UPPERCASE Work-in-Progress Society, uncovering our counterparts’ web habits in order to discover how we each can carve out the space we need to create.

Up Next: Textiles and Trampolines

Now that you’ve had issue #13 for a while, have you tried Tara O’Brady’s recipe for lucky spring rice on page 106? Truthfully, I am intimidated by it.

Tara was included in a National Post story where she noted that one of her most popular recipes is Caramel Self-Saucing Walnut Puddings.

And that’s where she had me.

Sometime this spring I will make Tara’s rice. Because someone who could create self-saucing pudding can’t be wrong. About anything.

Image from sevenspoons.net

This morning I took the tube to Anne Smith‘s studio on the South side of the Thames. Anne did the perfect pigeon illustration on the cover of issue #12, so I couldn’t come all this way and not meet her!

We had some tea and a nice chat about books, the realms of online and offline community, the creative drive and inspiration… so nice. Her studio had lots of books—I saw many that are common to my shelves at home. With nice light diffusing in from windows on two sides, it was a really fresh and inspiring studio.

See a few more images in the flickr set. Thanks, Anne!

Nikki Sheppy wears many hats around UPPERCASE. She’s a subscriber, a contributor, and an entertaining party guest. Nikki was profiled in issue #9 but, since she is our thirteenth subscriber, we asked her to share more with us.

Subscriber Profile: Nikki Sheppy

How are you creative in your daily life?
I dabble in cake-baking, doodle on napkins, and compose palindromic poetry (in which the word “the” never appears because I spurn interjections that make me seem too Canadian).

What are you most curious about?
Beautiful or unexpected forms. I like poetry, maps, data graphing, and architecture. I like abecedaria, altered books, and the sculptural potential of new paper and textile technologies.

What is your most prized possession?
Access to the world. I’m constantly grateful for the fully functioning faculties (motor, cognitive and sensory) that allow me to explore what’s out there. I think this is so basic and necessary that many of us take it for granted.

What is your favourite letter of the alphabet and why?
Usually, it’s Q – a smooth face with a single pubescent whisker; an O that forgot to shave; an R&D developer for the British Secret Service, slyly packing an arsenal of deadly gadgets: quirky amphibious cars and quinine-tipped darts. But today I prefer Z, a letter with a lot of razzle-dazzle, a zany gonzo journalist unafraid to veer boozily into the most improbable reaches of a story, taking every s-curve like a zed.

What is your favourite colour?
Cherry red – Visceral, as deeply satisfying as the fruit itself, bloody, not for the faint of heart, and the main contender in so many of those brisk plaids of the fifties.

What is your preferred creative tool?
Language. Its plasticity, its resistance, the coy, coltish way in which it refuses to let me write like wunderkind Karen Russell. The alphabet contains only 26 letters. How hard could it be?

Skye’s friend Mimi waving the tissue petals dry after painting their rims pink.

And I did what I always do: had madcap ‘crafter-noons’ with friends where we sat around my outdoor table and ate nice food and drank tea (and maybe some wine) and got to making something from the stuff that was in front of us. It was amazing to see people’s skills revealed in this way! It taught me much, which I was keen to pass on as tips throughout the book.

 Skye during a crafter-noon.