David Hammond


Creative Whispers has been a most interesting, inspiring and yet challenging exercise. Presented with starting points that I wouldn’t have chosen myself created the opportunity to elicit  inspiration from sources that I would never before have considered. The group meetings are a forum in which we have the opportunity to express the rationale behind our individual work. I have found that this has been an important aspect of ‘Creative Whispers’. To me, explaining the thought processes that are entailed in developing a piece of art work are just as important as the end product. The CRIT group has given me the opportunity to discuss my work in a most supportive environment. One of the most interesting aspects of the exercise and of the group itself is seeing the broad variety work of other practitioners and how they react, artistically, to differing challenges. 

I joined the CRITgroup in the autumn of 2012 with some trepidation. I accompanied my husband who was really interested in joining. I wasn’t sure with what I was getting involved, but as I was taking an Art Foundation Course I felt it would be a valuable experience. I expected to be able to take a back seat, listen to others talking about their work and gain knowledge and information from them. Gradually as I gained confidence I felt I would be able to join in the discussions etc. However this static involvement was not to be! One could say I was thrown in at the deep end, but I found the experience to be exciting. To take someone else’s work and develop it using my own style provided quite a few challenges. My previous involvements in Mathematics led me to an architectural interest in art, specifically developing cityscapes in 2D and 3D abstract form. I received a wide variety of styles of artwork from other members of the group. These could then be used as a starting point to stimulate my response. This became an enjoyable challenge as it led me along different paths than those that I would normally have chosen. At times this involved me taking previous work apart in order to produce something completely different, but records of all stages were kept. It upholds my belief that art should not be static, but rather ever changing and developing, depending on the situation, the environment and the viewer. A truly enjoyable experience.

Shirley Hammond

James Sharp


The artists participating in this project were from random backgrounds and not selected for the exercise. This meant that we had to respond to an unbalanced range of artistic contributions with photography heavily over-represented. In some respects this increased the challenge but it meant that the response tended to be trying to instil life into a flat dull piece that was passed on. Nevertheless, it was an interesting exercise and should be the basis for future collaborations and artistic discussion.

This project has given me space to explore areas outside of my comfort zone, in a safe environment where it didn’t matter if that idea worked or not.  Each month with each new object I received to respond to within a fixed deadline, gave me a reason and the time to produce work.   The mixture of disciplines in the group has influenced my photography; I have realised I want to produce photography in its simplest form and my work to be about the photography and not about the process. My final response to Creative Whispers, the urban landscapes, I would like to develop further, I came to this point through this project.  I don’t think I would have started this work if I hadn’t gone through this process, I wouldn’t have had a reason to do the work.  I feel it is an accumulation of ideas explored, which I needed to go through.  For this reason I have found Creative Whispers a useful project which has facilitated in the development my ideas.

Irena Siwiak Atamewan

Christine Wilcox-Baker

I joined CRITgroup as a new way to extend my professional development through inspiration, discussion and collaboration. For me the Creative Whispers project has been a way to examine my practice and what drives it. In responding to each stage I have explored working with different subject matter and in each case this has stimulated ways of representing my core inspiration – Nature. CRITgroup has helped me to confirm my artistic focus through the positive challenges of my fellow artists and has given me ideas for using new materials and methodologies.
Being involved in the Creative Whispers CRITlaboration allowed for a broad range of approaches, investigation and experimentation. The focus of this project lay in the metamorphoses of ideas and investigation of questions arising from the creative process rather than in the production of resolved final pieces. Leading up to graduation in Fine Art last year my main focus had been abstract painting and working self-directed. By working from an idea or an object given to me by a fellow artist as my starting point and a deadline for my response Creative Whispers provided a clear framework, and gave me freedom to respond in any direction my starting point led me. This felt at times both daunting, because my starting point was out of my control, and liberating because it pushed/helped me widen my scope. Surprisingly painting figured very little in my responses. I felt an obligation but little urge to respond by painting, and my ideas led me elsewhere, mostly the comfortable realm of photography (always figured highly in my creative output long before I had even begun to draw and paint), the playground of working conceptually and even poetry: a book of Haiku augmented by photography and calligraphy coincided with a rare turn of good weather in March – I went walking in the Boggart Hole Clough, took photographs and  composed my own Haiku. Working on the final response I realised that much of the work revolved around similar ideas centring around issues such as memories buried or suppressed or being reclusive with a limited outlook on the world. Christine Wilcox-Baker’s Sanctuary inspired me to draw together some of the ideas I have begun to explore throughout the project and return to some older ones. My Sanctuary is a refuge of the mind, a freedom of ideas, a shelter for creativity.

Renate Wendel

Kevin Linnane


This project gave me an interesting insight into working practice and to reassess the often used words (in the art world), ‘respond to’. Dictionary define respond as ‘to say or do something as a reaction to something that has been said or done’ or ‘say something in reply’. With a diverse group the approaches would obviously be varied, art and craft.  Both practices have a view of responding, whether to the idea or the object.  I found myself doing both and questioning my practice.The work in response, recording sites of convergence and significance, meeting places.  Mapping a response to place or objects contained, being out of place out of context a collective identity. 
I approached this project experimentally and though I had no preconceptions regarding what I should learn from it, was determined to discover something. I enjoyed making time to produce work unconnected to my practice; not justifying it in that context, just following creative instinct. This experimental perspective liberated me to worry less about quality, not overthink my responses and embrace the first ideas I had. In collaborating, it was difficult to avoid ‘cross-pollination’ and not be influenced by more than my given response. I think this shows in recurring themes that are not solely due to single threads between pieces; we’ve ended with a web of responses. This is interesting; though I wonder how different the project would have been had we not shared responses openly and passed them on without discussion. Observing other’s responses was fascinating; I suspect comments about ‘quality’ that I found unnecessarily judgmental originate from a clash between perspectives that idealise either technical or conceptual prioritisation. A common debate, though I doubt how productive this polarisation is to the arts in general and hope practitioners can move on from it. Another contrast in approach was the question of whether to ‘destroy’ to ‘create’ where an instinctive respect afforded to others’ work caused reluctance to amend submissions. I noticed too, that some are comfortable sticking with one technique or style where others generate different outcomes, raising further questions; should we specialise or diversify? I have gained fresh perspective on my practice by stepping outside of it and have galvanised my resolve to maintain a concept, not process based approach where materials are determined by concept as opposed to allowing preferred media to shape an idea. I have identified how easy it is to slip into set methods of working, which I believe are a survival mechanism for productivity in a busy life but sometimes too comfortable, and that these structures benefit from frequent revision if they are to sustain a meaningful practice.

Annabeth Orton