A Widening Field

This is a handbook for working in the creative arts, with an emphasis on imagination and receptivity: to our bodies, surroundings, materials, and to what we create. It puts particular emphasis upon the sensing, feeling, moving body as a basis for any imaginative activity.

It describes sources and strategies for working in and between various forms of expression, including: moving, making things with materials and writing. It stresses the importance of intuitive, instinctive ways of knowing, perceiving and creating.

It is a useful resource for anyone studying or teaching in the arts, or working creatively with others: therapeutically, educationally, or in a community context. It is written to inspire rather than to instruct, to be used in small amounts to stimulate a working process, rather than to be read through from cover to cover.

The authors’ previous book, ‘Body Space Image’, was about improvised movement, experimental performance and creating performance settings. This book turns to the question of imagination in our lives and how this is awakened and nourished through attention to the present, feeling world of the body and to whatever appears as we make.

In this way we enter into the poetics of our experience.

Author Biography

Miranda Tufnell is a dancer, Alexander teacher and craniosacral therapist. She has been showing her performance work in galleries and theatres since 1976, often making sitespecific events and collaborating with visual artists. She has taught widely, including periods of teaching at Dartington College of Arts and at Fellside Alexander School.
Her work both as a dancer/choreographer and body therapist has been to make visible the invisible world of the sensing body.

Chris Crickmay trained as an architect, but has worked mainly in visual art with a strong interest in the links between art, dance and creativity. In his teaching career, he was one of the initiators of the Open University’s course, ‘Art and Environment’.
As head of Art and Design at Dartington College of Arts, he helped create and run a degree course entitled ‘Art and Social Context’. He now works as an independent writer and artist, continuing to participate in collaborations across the arts.