“There is no such thing as an immortal work of art. There is one art – the greatest of all, the art of making a complete human being of oneself.”
Alfred Richard Orage
“Entering one’s interior story takes a courage similar to starting a
novel.”
James Hillman, 1983, p.55
The creative project has been an extremely valuable part of the MA course for me. Within the confines of academic demands it is often difficult to move out of the head, indeed this has been one of the very unique challenges of the programme. The degree has offered a number of wonderful opportunities to tackle this issue by actively encouraging a more heart centred and intuitive approach to the content that we are facing here as students. To become more “…consciously aware of our intuitive process…” (Anderson, 2004, p.70) is a refreshing challenge to the more traditional approaches of academic research and engagement. But to be able to open the heart and engage our intuition in a manner that retains a level of conscious awareness and an ability to ‘see’ this process critically, is the real nature of the challenge we face as students. This represents new ground.
I had decided by this point in the course that I would make a film/video that would use the images of the 22 trump cards of the tarot, the major arcana of the occultist tarot. This same journey that archetypal psychologists have suggested is also representative of the individuation process and a movement through archetypes of the unconscious (Nichols, 1980) My hope was that I may be able to capture the essence of these ideas, both psychological and occult, in a manner that aimed towards an initiatory and educational experience for the audience. I had decided to allow influences from the world of psychedelic art to influence the form of this piece in an attempt to further facilitate this experience. An experience that I hoped would also be able to hold true to a foundational concern for platonic ideas of education.
