Creative Camp has its own compost now.

The art is making art, folks!

It’s time for camp to eat its own leftovers.

Day 13 of taking myself to Creative Camp.

I’m a Creative Director trying to be more creative, so I built a camp instead of a content strategy. Come along!

Today’s randomly generated prompt is:Sculpt.
Found.
Limit.

Hello, “Limit” twist, my old friend.

Limit, aka Contain, is about creative constraints: one ingredient, one medium, one color, etc.

Today’s prompt is asking me to “Sculpt” with “Found Objects” but the “Limit” does not exist?! Bad joke. But what’s my creative constraint tho? I already created a junk mail “found” object collage on Day 5. In fact, the scraps from that project still sit on the Home Office Palace Floor.

I’ve collected quite a trash can full o’ treasures across my 13 days of Creative Camp so far; the bicycle film fest poster at the Kiggins on Day 11, my AdBusters collage compost from Days 7–8, my junk mail shrapnel from Day 5.

What if I sculpted from my Creative Camp compost? I think. Or…

What if I sculpted FOR it?

As I roll the prompt (and the dice) around, I look at the little planter symbolizing “Limit” or “Contain” and start thinking:

What if today’s sculpture IS a container for all my Creative Camp found objects and trash turned treasures AND even better, what if I sculpted FROM Creative Camp found objects?

Rule #1: Use what you have started as a practical rule to keep me from over-consuming or wasting time creating waste.

Don’t buy anything. Get creative with what you have.

Now Creative Camp has its own COMPOST: treasures and leftovers, bits and bobs, souvenirs I can’t quite bear to part with yet.

As the container of camp keeps me moving forward, I have learned that if I can trust the process, one day’s trash will become another day’s treasure.

I can’t stop and look for the “perfect” thing; I need to use what I have and keep moving forward, because in doing so, I’m creating what Future Me doesn’t even know she needs yet. So, yup that’s that. Today’s sculpture is a container.
Creative Camp is a container.
A practice is a container.

A container, a limit, isn’t about STOPPING creativity, but giving it somewhere to go, or, grow. Usually both.

So a container it is and I have the perfect “use what you have” trash collecting dust in a cabinet somewhere ready to become treasure.

I even save “sculpture” time itself for a “found” pocket of time when we are gathered to watch a movie and I can happily do camp in the corner.

And as I set to work sculpting, I reflect on how Rule #1: Use what you have goes far beyond paint + paper + art supplies

“Use what you have” also means use your skill, your wisdom, your network, your community.

Lisa Robbin Young calls this “outsourced certainty,” when we go to the marketplace of ideas to tell us what to do instead of using what we have.

Rule #3: Process over product means that there is something inexplicably magical IN THE DOING that cannot be outsourced.

Back to the sculpture.

It needs something MORE to be, well, sculpture-y, I think is the official word?

Googly eyes? No. This container is about looking inward, not outward.

Then I find it – a little handmade box of painted seashells, nature’s sculptures if you will, I bought from a traveling artist in Mexico 10 years ago.

Talk about creative compost. This little matchbox was waiting to live here.

There’s something about putting this on that feels right AND gives me great relief; this piece has floated around in boxes and drawers for a decade, slowly getting more weathered.

Eventually it’d get lost to time. But now it lives here. I love that I took an ill-fated souvenir in peril of fading away forever and gave it a home.

Every time I turn something into art, frame it, get it on camera, “on the record” as I often say, it feels like I’ve memorialized something important. Turned a moment into a living souvenir.

If a container gives our creativity somewhere to go and grow, art gives our memories somewhere to live and live on.

Welcome to camp.