Regeneration: Reflecting on our Collaborative Writing, Making and Moving Inquiry
To regenerate implies renewal, a restoration – a return to life and liveliness following damage or disturbance.
Late last spring, on an organic farm in Wales, nine members of CANI-net gathered together for three days and nights to write and regenerate together. Since then, we have continued to meet and work together, to be worked together, to be met, compelled as it were, by some force of nature… that is writing to us, writing through us, each in our own way. As we re-turn to our writing, to our making, and our moving, the words re-form, re-emphasise and clarify matters.
How does our writing from that time reveal the regenerative process? The fresh, spontaneous gestures of those present, (re)produced ways of being that were familiar to some, new to others, (re)encountering a process that processed us, a little less, a little more, (re)animating a sense of being with(in) matters more than human.
In this session, we share work that is still in motion, invite you to move with it, with us, and to offer your responses in turn.
Presenter Biographies
Dr. Karen Abadie is an installation and moving image artist working with video, analogue film and sound whose films and installations have been shown both nationally and internationally. She is also a lecturer in Fine Art at Plymouth University, teaches on BA Drawing and MA Fine Art at Falmouth University.
Laurinda Brown (to follow)
Dr. Melissa Dunlop is a psychotherapist, supervisor and independent researcher using creative (collaborative, artful, narrative) methodologies to explore conscious and unconscious relational processes.
Carol Laidler is a multi-disciplinary artist based at Spike Island, Bristol. Her practice explores the materiality of word and sound. Her site specific installations highlight the conflicting narratives that emerge within the history of place drawing on memory, perception and more than human experience.
Marian Liebmann is a mediator, restorative justice facilitator and art therapist, and author/ editor of 14 books on these topics.
Marina Malthouse is a retired palliative care physician and came to CANI-Net through an EdD in Narrative Inquiry with Jane Speedy (2012). She stays involved with academia as a supervisor, internal examiner and marker for psychotherapy Doctoral and Master’s students. Alternatively she can be found volunteering in Greece in an intentional community or for refugees.
Dr. Alys Mendus has been having fun with CANI-net since 2015 and helped to co-create this year's Regeneration CANI-net writing retreat with Melissa Dunlop as she was so keen for an inperson writing retreat to happen again after she had been living in Australia for 4 years and is currently back in the UK. Alys Mendus is an artist, author, casual academic and feminist parent keen to collaborate with others troubling and changing our world.
Gracie Mendus (to follow)
Mark Price has worked as a playworker, teacher, youth worker and psychotherapist. He is now Associate Professor of Education at St Mary’s University, London and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the University of Edinburgh.