Ep #3: Autism, creativity, and pursuing a multi-passionate career - with artist & author Lucy H. Pearce

Podcast

Aug 15

I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with the multi-talented Lucy H. Pearce this week, and let me tell you, it was a corker.

Lucy is one of those people who does ALL THE THINGS - she's an artist, an author, an editor, and runs her own publishing company (Womancraft Publishing). We had a proper natter about what it's like to be neurodivergent and creative, and how getting diagnosed with autism later in life can crack your world wide open.

We dug into the nitty-gritty of being a "multi-passionate" creative (hello, kindred spirit!) and how to juggle all those balls without dropping dead from exhaustion. Lucy shared some fantastic insights about her creative process and how she approaches making art that resonates on a gut level.

And of course, we couldn't help but dive into the whole neurodiversity and creativity thing. It was fascinating to hear how Lucy's diagnosis has shaped her understanding of herself and her work, and she dished out some proper good advice for other creatives who might be feeling a bit out of step with the world too.

If you're into the intersection of creativity and neurodiversity, or just fancy hearing about forging your own unique path in the arts, you're going to love this episode - it's chock-full of inspiration and practical tips. Give it a listen and let me know what you think!

You can watch the video version here:

Or listen to the audio version here (click the arrow at the bottom right to play):

Find out more about Lucy:

Lucy H. Pearce is the author of multiple life-changing non-fiction books, including Nautilus Award silver winners Medicine Woman, Burning Woman, and Creatrix: she who makes. Her other titles include Amazon #1 bestsellers Crow Moon, Moon Time, as well as She of the Sea, Reaching for the Moon, Moods of Motherhood, The Rainbow Way, Full Circle Health and she is the co-author and illustrator of The Kitchen Witch Companion. Her writing focuses on women’s healing through archetypal psychology, embodiment, historical awareness and creativity. Her work has been shared internationally in online and print media.

She is the host of Creative Magic podcast, exploring the creative process with creative and magical guests each week.

An award-winning graduate in History of Ideas with English Literature from Kingston University, and a PGCE from Cambridge University, Lucy founded Womancraft Publishing in 2014, publishing paradigm-shifting books by women for women.

Lucy is a multi-faceted creative whose work spans the expressive arts, exploring the lost archetypes of the feminine and symbols of the soul. Her visual art has been used as book covers, book illustrations, in magazines, greetings cards, logos and even on a wine label. She has had several exhibitions and her art sits in collections in the UK, US, Ireland and the UAE. She is a much in demand teacher at international events and teaches regular e-courses on creative writing, editing and publishing.

The mother of three children, she lives in a small village by the Celtic Sea in East Cork, Ireland.

Visit Lucy’s website
Find Lucy on Instagram
Find Womancraft Publishing on Instagram
Find the Creative Magic podcast on Instagram

Eli: Hello everybody, I'm joined here by the incredible Lucy Pearce, who is, oh my gosh, what don't you do? She's an artist, she's an artist, she is an editor, she's most well known for being the author of some of the most incredible nonfiction books that you can find. She has her own publishing company, she's a teacher, she's everything.
Lucy: I'll tell you what I don't do. I don't keep a tidy house. My house is such a fucking mess.
Eli: I am not surprised. I am astonished that you have the time and the energy to do everything you do.
Eli: So you need to tell us like, what's your background? How did you end up with this incredible portfolio career?
Lucy: Okay. So. I've always done a lot of stuff. I've always been multi-passionate. I've never been able to make my mind up between what I love most. So I kind of just do it all. And I have this really incredible capacity to do a lot of stuff very fast. And then I have this other capacity, which is to then completely crash and burn because I can't possibly sustain all that. While doing all the things fast, I'm like, why doesn't everybody do this? Why is everyone else so boring and they just do one thing? And then when I crash and burn and I can't do anything for weeks or months and I'm like, oh yeah, okay, that's why. So,
Eli: Very right
Lucy: I'm not like a nicely sustained person. I have energetic whoops where I can set the world alight, I can do everything and then I have lots and lots of downtime going through a tree called brain not working properly. So I think people need to know that about me. Like what you see on the outside when I can show up to an interview is somebody who's really energetic.
Eli: This is very relatable.
Lucy: But what you don't see is that I'm going to be in bed for the rest of the day under a duvet and just in a dark room and recuperating.
Lucy: And it's not that I don't love doing this sort of thing and I don't love creating. I do. That's why I do it. But I seem to have to do it at full capacity and then nothing. so I discovered this during my teens, like I was very academic, but I was also very creative. So, you know, all the teachers were pushing me to take on more academic subjects. So I did that, but I really needed to do all the creative stuff too. So I was taking drama classes. I was in drama competitions.
Lucy: I was directing and I was acting and I was translating plays and I was in the choirs and I was in loads of performances.
Eli: Wow.
Lucy: and doing more subjects than most people. And then the first major kind of crash and I was like, oh sugar. And I thought I'm going mad. And I didn't understand what was happening because for those who are not caught up with the Lucy HP story, I am officially autistic. And I didn't know that until I was in my late thirties. So I didn't have the language to navigate this all I knew was I was different to everybody else but you know that difference was down to most of my friends were either creative or they were academic very few were both or you know I my dad is Irish my mum is English I've grown up between two countries so I've never quite fit in anywhere so I kind of could put it down to that sort of thing
Eli: Right.
Lucy: And then, so I went to drama school, much to the disappointment of my school, who all wanted me to go to Oxford or Cambridge, dropped out after the first year because of this other thing that I didn't understand, which had emerged during that first breakdown point called anxiety. I didn't have a word for that until I was in my early 30s. And so all I knew was that I was going to die if I went back to drama school for the second year. My health had started shutting down during drama school, I didn't know what it was, doctors couldn't tell me what was wrong with me, but couldn't function.
Lucy: And so all I knew was I had to get out of there, otherwise I was going to die. So I went on to an academic course called History of Ideas with English Literature. And I just fell on my feet with that because it is a really eclectic subject. It's philosophy within a historical context, but not just kind of what we would in Western culture think of as philosophy, as in very kind of dry thought things. but we were looking at the impact of religion, the impact of gender, the impact of the natural world and how we considered it and how we worked with it.
Eli: That's so exciting.
Lucy: We were looking at traditions outside of the western context. So for someone like me it was heaven because it was books
Lucy: Oh, it was so good. It was books galore. And the two people who were teaching it, because there's only two places in the world that do it, they were the people writing the textbooks. So they were passionate about it too.
Lucy: And we had this small little group of kind of funny little raggedy-taggy group of people of all different ages and backgrounds. Like our oldest students were in their 70s and everybody just wanted to be doing it. And so that for me set the ground of kind of inter, what's the term for it? The Americans. The Americans have a lovely term for it. I'm gonna say intersubjectivity is not the right word. but working across multidisciplinary but more than that working across the boundaries of subjects in the way that western culture especially in universities very much has broken it down into right you study psychology or you study religion or you study philosophy or you study english no we studied all of it and so that very much set the seeds for my writing was it gave me the permission to
Lucy: scoot across those and totally disrespect the guidelines. So I call myself genre non-conforming because there is poetry, there is memoir, there is history of ideas very much in my writing, there are other women's voices, there is ritual and ceremony and it's all woven in energetically into this slightly unusual but quite distinctive
Lucy: melee, which becomes a book. And so that set me in very good stead. Then I went through a few years whilst I was doing that degree of trying to be normal. That was an interesting approach.
Lucy: So I dressed very boringly, as you can see, I like colour, I dressed grey and black and kind of nothing very interesting, and went travelling but decided to train to be a teacher. So I did go to Cambridge and trained to be a teacher in English and drama. Again, more kind of stuff to the basket of tools that I was adding up. But stop painting, stop writing, because I really just wanted to be normal and fit in.
Lucy: But with the pregnancy and birth of my first child, a little ahead of schedule, my creativity came out like a tidal wave, totally unexpected. Like Western culture does not tell you that your creativity, your artistic creativity is in any way related to your libido, your sexuality, or motherhood. They just don't.
Lucy: It's like, nah, they're two separate things, two different boxes.
Lucy: And I learned, firsthand that that is not true. And it totally surprised me. And so I had another couple of kids in quick succession and felt like I was going insane because this creative urge was getting bigger and stronger in me. I couldn't do anything academic because I was there minding small kids.
Lucy: All the things that I had been in the world I couldn't be. And so that urge was strong. At the same time, my mothering urge to be there hands on with my children. And I thought for a long time that I was the only one and that I was crazy. And so I tried to hide it in the circles of mums and who all just seemed to be interesting talking about, you know, breastfeeding and nappies.
Lucy: And I was like, no. And then I kind of started to attract friends who were experiencing the same and we would kind of talk about how much we were longing to make things. And so, my first book came at me the idea for it fully formed when I came across an archetype called the creative rainbow mother in a book I was reading, one of my favourite books. And I just had never, I'd never seen this passage, even though I'd read it many times before. And I was like, I need to know more about the creative rainbow mother. That is me. And so I Googled and there was like one blog post from a woman, Leonie Dawson,
Lucy: That's how I found her and nothing else.
Lucy: And I was like, fuck this for a laugh. I need this book.
Lucy: And so I wrote it. I'd said that was the book that I put out around various publishers, got my few rejections as one does. And being somebody who can't sit still when they have creative energy pulsing through them, I wrote another three books and self-published them whilst I was waiting for a publisher. Got the publishing deal, hurray hurrah, except it wasn't exactly as I was expecting this route of being published.
Lucy: So when that happened, I jumped ship from my job where I was working as a contributing editor to a parenting magazine because they couldn't give me a pay raise and started a publishing company because that's what you do when you've got three small children and you need some money.
Lucy: So yeah. And because it's a small company, I get to do all the things. I get to do editing, which I love. I get to mentor our authors, which I love. I get to... design the whole concept of the book from the page layout to the cover design. I get to, along with the author, pick the artist that we love for the cover art. I get to create the marketing campaigns and you know make the material for that. So it's like it's fun because I get to have all the fingers and all the pies.
Eli: I love that you've just kind of built this sort of, it's almost like a cocoon around yourself of just the world that you want to live in, like the publishing experience that you want to have, the books you want to read, you're just creating it all yourself, which is so inspirational.
Lucy: Yeah. It's nuts. Whoa, it's nuts on one level. I get that.
Eli: Absolutely, so brilliant.
Lucy: It's more, it's more stuff than anyone should actually sanely do. But I love it all. And when I try, I like, every year, year and a half, I hit, this is too much, this is insanity, Lucy. And I weed and I prune and I hand things over to other people and I stop doing things. And then I gradually take on other things and make other little jobs.
Lucy: But you know, like, I do that on a regular basis to keep it manageable, to keep myself alive and functional. So I do have that capacity to say no and to stop doing things and to pass things on, but I just... You know, there's this pressure on when you've got a company in, in patriarchal culture, capitalist culture is to keep growing, to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And I'm like, no, because then I'd have to specialise. I'd just be the editor or I'd just be the CEO.
Lucy: I don't want that for myself. I want to do a variety of different things.
Eli: All the things.
Lucy: Yeah.
Eli: Yeah, yeah I can really relate to that.
Eli: That need for variety and that need for sort of novelty is such a sort of driving force.
Lucy: And I don't have to do all the things now, like, because, you know, I used to do the taxes and the layout and, you know, so all of those things have been passed on. I used to do the newsletters. I don't have to do them anymore. So I've passed on lots of the less interesting stuff for me to do the stuff that I'm really good at and that I haven't found somebody who I feel like who could replace me doing bits that I do.
Eli: Yeah. And you get to keep the joyful bits, the bit that feels the most fun and the most energising.
Lucy: Well, for me, the choice has always been between words and images. And my very clear decision again and again and again throughout my life is both. I have to have both.
Eli: That's a really interesting point, actually, because I mean, We live in a society that reveres specialists above all else, like anyone, you know, we have all of these idioms and things about how, you know, I can't think of the word, but, you know, how generalists are just not as good as specialists. I'm wondering, kind of, I mean, I think I probably already know what your take on that is, but do you have any kind of advice for anyone who's like, okay, I want to do all the things, but I can't get over this sort of internalised fear.
Lucy: Yeah. There's a book called Refuse to Choose. Yes. That book, read that book and you'll get off your own back and you'll find a lot of tools for yourself in the process. My book Creatrix also talks about that multi-passionate creative. And I know an awful lot of women have found that very helpful too.
Eli: It's such a good book.
Lucy: But Refuse to Choose is an absolute classic. And I think she's speaking to the autistic ADHD person before we really had language for that.
Eli: Absolutely. yeah Her whole language around scanners and and all of that, was it's so ADHD. like
Lucy: Yeah, so I feel that most of the time all you need is a reframing in order to be accepting of yourself rather than rejecting of yourself. And then you've just got to find out how to do your thing wiser so that you are not damaging yourself in the process.
Lucy: But I think the first thing is just getting off your own back in terms of shame.
Eli: Absolutely.
Lucy: And that's an ongoing process because you're going against the world that is shaming you in little ways and big ways all the time and telling you how it should be. And you're having to say, no, this is how it is.
Lucy: This is how it is for me. And you've got to find ways to make that work. I mean like I'm not the best editor in the world by a long stretch. People who specialise in editing are much better editors than me. But I do it my way. I have my way of what I call creative energy creative editing or energetic editing, which I don't think that many people do. And so while somebody might kind of get far better, perfect, perfect grammar in something, I'll get a really interesting feel to the book that I think a lot of more
Lucy: God, my brain and words today, kind of intellectually-backed cerebral editors don't necessarily.
Lucy: And so I go for the sort of books that i can I can help bring out into the world in the best way possible, that I know that womancraft can make a real home for and bring into our community that will build to the library of wisdom that we are putting out into the world and will be enjoyed by our community of readers.
Eli: Yeah. And I think that sort of ability to give yourself permission, I feel like it's almost easier for people who are neurodivergent because we're so out of step with the rest of the world anyway. We're so used to having to sort of figure stuff out by ourselves that it becomes just an extension of that. You're not kind of in the mainstream and then trying to go against it. You're already outside of that.
Lucy: Yeah, you're not gonna get full acceptance ever.
Lucy: But the reality is, I think, until you are diagnosed, you don't have a... realistic self concept, perhaps you don't have a real understanding of who you are and how you work. Once you have a diagnosis, self diagnosed, I'm not dismissing in any way because you know, it's an identification process.
Lucy: But once you have that, that way of identifying who you are and how you work in the world, then there is a conscious awareness that comes to who you are in the world that you've never had before. Before you've always been kind of working on guesswork and second guessing and reading things maybe be right, maybe be wrong. Now you've actually got kind of firm information about who you are and how you work. And it moves that ability to function in the world into your conscious brain, which then means you can navigate as you want to rather than in a very kind of hit and miss way.
Eli: That's so true. My world cracked wide open when I got my diagnosis. All of a sudden, I just had so much more understanding of who I was and where I fit in with the world and where I didn't fit in with the world. and It gave me an enormous sense of just like, well, if I'm this, then I'm going to be this to you know as much as I possibly can. And forget about that. like I'm never going to get that. So I'm going to do that.
Lucy: Well, you're not, you're literally never going to be neurotypical, but however hard you try. So you literally are what you are. And, and so work with that because yes, there are challenges that come with it, lots and lots of second challenges, but there are also gifts and abilities that come with it as well.
Eli: So you and I were diagnosed late in life, around about the same time. Can you talk a bit about getting a diagnosis and kind of how that sort of understanding of yourself came to impact your work and sort of how you operate?
Lucy: Sure. So I came to my diagnosis because my middle child was having huge struggles in the world. And we were trying to, I was especially trying to get to the bottom of what is this that we're dealing with? Because this isn't something that seems familiar to anybody and nobody was able to really kind of help make her feel safe in the world. And it was like, okay, so what is this that we're dealing with?
Lucy: So, waiting lists for public diagnosis here are horrific, like three or four years. And we were at the stage where we needed it fast to help support her. So I got the name of a private guy who works publicly for one area, and then for our area, you could hire him privately. And he was just fabulous. We had about three, four hours talking with him, getting her diagnosis. And I just felt really safe with him. And so I emailed him afterwards, he just, he was really accepting and really
Lucy: It wasn't like, oh, those weird autistic people or those poor little autistic children. It was just, you know, he was talking about autistic friends of himself and clients of his who he just had really great respect for and connection with. And I just thought, yeah, you're my sort of person. I go through life looking for safe people.
Lucy: And he was immediately a safe person. And so I emailed him, said, I was wondering about me, what do you think? And he said, well, if the cat fits, where? And I said, that's great. Thank you. But I need to know for sure, because as a writer, I'm going to be putting this into books and I don't want to be claiming something that I'm not. in a way that is misleading to readers, that might be confusing to them, that might send them down the wrong path. I need to know for sure if I'm going to be putting this out into the world. So he very, very kindly, like we couldn't afford a private diagnosis at all, like my in-laws had paid for for my
Lucy: my daughter's one and he offered to do it in exchange for one of my paintings because he admired my paintings as you know while he was in our house and so that was really meaningful to me to exchange something that I had created in part because of this mind that I have in order for the identification of this mind that I have.
Lucy: And where I do think diagnosis with the right person is even more helpful than self-diagnosis is there were many times when I was going through my history telling him stories about what had happened where he said, you know, Lucy, that wasn't okay what they did. And I was like, okay, I didn't realise that. Or, you know, Lucy, not everybody thinks the way you would have in that situation. That's quite unusual there. Most people would... doda-da And I was like, what? Really? And like, he stopped me in my tracks several times with that, saying, that's not what we would consider a normal response to that. And I'm like,
Lucy: nobody had ever and I'd been through you know therapy at various points have very close friends shared these and nobody had said you see that's not what most people do there and so that was really really helpful to me and in some things where
Lucy: I was still stuck on the same thing again and again. He would say, you know, have you considered maybe doing this for yourself in order to... And I was like, whoa, no, I hadn't. I hadn't known that was an option. And so stuff like that, you you can only get from someone outside of yourself, somebody who is very experienced with neurodivergence and has a way of being able to kind of open windows to the world to you in a way that you literally can't do for yourself because you can't see what you can't see. You don't know what you don't know. So I found an aspie women's group in the city and I went there and I made some friends there. And it was the first time I knew that I was meeting autistic people, you know, and I was in my late thirties. the irony is now that more than half of my no half of my siblings and my mother and my daughter are all now diagnosed and I have no doubt it goes back through the generations too and a huge amount of our friendship group have children who are diagnosed and you know I have a pretty strong suspicion that a fair few of them are too. like we Birds of a feather flock together, we do. You know you are attracted to people who are like you, who understand you, who share a world view and even just down to what they enjoy doing socially and not.
Lucy: You know I'm not friends with people who need me to go clubbing every night because no can do.
Lucy: So I kind of realised there was this about a year of processing it, which was really hard. Really, really hard seeing all the ways that I'd fucked up without knowing, seeing ways that others had been hurtful without knowing. building up a huge amount of compassion for myself and understanding of others as to why they might have been the way they were given the information that they had about me and how they were judging me as obviously not normal and they were right, I wasn't.
Eli: Okay.
Lucy: And so it was a year of private processing before I shared the diagnosis at some point towards the end of that. And that, that felt like coming out, like it was a big, big deal. It was very scary, but also it's just incredible how many people have come to me in the years since and said, reading that post or reading what you've written in your books since was the light bulb moment to me, of hang on, I identify with everything that she's just said, this is me too. And they had never known that. And I very much found that, sorry, a piece I missed out was at some time around my daughter's diagnosis, Leonie Dawson had written a post about being autistic. I don't know if she's got a diagnosis at that stage or not, but she realised she was. And she's a woman whose business and marketing world has been incredibly influential to me through growing my business as a creative entrepreneur. She's bright and colourful and loud and sweary and totally not what you would expect from somebody who teaches business.
Lucy: I just always felt really resonant with what she was doing. And so when she said that about herself, I was like, well, then this is, in a way, this is what the creative rainbow mother archetype is. And I haven't realised that either.
Lucy: And interestingly, a huge amount of the people who contributed to that first book, The Rainbow Way, either they or their children are now diagnosed as ADHD. So it kind of goes to show you that, you know, this, this, this interesting archetype that wasn't written about much, you know, at the same as the highly sensitive person book, and the refuse to choose, were ways of naming those of us who weren't diagnosed because we weren't severely autistic enough to be recognised, and we weren't male enough to be recognised in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Lucy: But now, with how they are diagnosing and what they know about neurodivergence are getting diagnosed in our droves. And those people were naming it before there was a name. And so I have really great respect for them as wayshowers and language givers, because that's very much what I see my work as, is giving language to the unspoken and the unspeakable parts of ourselves.
Eli: Oh, I love that.
Lucy: Yeah. And so I just, whenever I find a woman who has done that for me in the past, I know what it's, it's like a shift in your very being and your very timeline of ancestors, because suddenly something that has gone unspoken for generations has a way that you can speak about it.
Lucy: And that, that is everything.
Eli: It really is. Language is so phenomenally powerful when you find the right words to put around a concept or something. It's like magic. It really is.
Lucy: Yeah.
Eli: I'm curious how that translates to the visual work you do as well. Was this stuff coming out visually before you had kind of the language to put around it?
Lucy: I have a way a way of working in my journals, I call words and image, and I go backwards and forwards between words and images, images and words, in order to try and get to concepts that I might have feeling for or there might be like a metaphor or a cliche that keeps kind of pinging in my brain. And I don't really know what it's about, but I want to dig into it. And most of my books are, they work with archetypes, what I call the lost archetypes of the feminine. And that for me is a real way of uncovering things that I don't have language for. And again, it's going through the metaphors that we use, the feelings that we have,
Lucy: the images that arise and trying to intermingle them together to try and get to the root of that kind of energetic stuff that's underneath them, of what they're representing in our psyches.
Lucy: So that that is the work that I do, like I hear
Lucy: full sentences, full paragraphs sometimes, and I need to write them down. At other times, I will just get a sense of an energetic, which I almost see visually. It's it's it's kind of, it's like whatever the one step before an image is, I get that. And I put it on as an image because it's not in word form.
Lucy: So a lot of my work has been. They're the two different sides of the brain working to create that and they're getting information from the unconscious self. So the only way we have to access that is through movement, through words or through images. So I combine all of those in order to try and access whatever that is, that is like, it's like an itch that you can't touch.
Eli: Yeah I did.
Eli: Okay.
Lucy: But it becomes so all consuming. Like as an autistic person, I often get very kind of looping thoughts that just won't stop and it goes on and on and on. And it's like that, but deeper and internally it's more, it's not an everyday thing. It's like, it's where your psyche is wanting to go next for your own psychological development. but there are no words for it, so you have to find them. So that's what I'm working with when I do the work that I do.
Lucy: I don't know if that's an answer to your question, but that's the truth of what I do.
Eli: No, no, it absolutely I mean, it resonates with me so much. And I think there is something again, particularly about the neuro divergent brain that does this both sides of the brain thing, like we have the visual stuff. And often for me, the stuff comes up visually first, I get that, that moment before the image, which I always sort of describe as like, it's like a sparkly, colourful, amorphous blob of thought with no language. And that comes through for me into images. And then after that, I can find the words around it because I have something concrete that I can describe, even if it's just like an energetic resonance. And I always think it's really interesting when people come to my work, often it's not so much what is depicted on the picture plane, it's the energetic thing that people respond to or don't respond to. And I think there's a there's
Eli: There's something about the way our brains work that we have the ability to bridge the gap between the right brain and the left brain in a way that neurotypical people on the whole tend to be either one or the other.
Lucy: Yeah, I think so.
Eli: And I think that's absolutely magical. I think it's really, really exciting.
Lucy: Yeah, it can also be really overwhelming when you don't understand it and the world is too loud outside and daily life is too much. And then you've got that going on as well. It can feel like you're going crazy. And especially if you don't have an outlet that you trust, if you don't have like a journaling practice or
Eli: Yeah.
Lucy: a trust that using paints or pencils will get it out of you, then it's stuck in there and it's like you're held hostage with all of this crazy swirling noise that you can't. So I mean, for me, that is why creativity is not just a nice hobby. It is literally a way of living and functioning.
Eli: There's a wonderful quote on your website. I wrote it down, actually, where you say, through creativity, we heal ourselves and all those whose lives we touch. And that and when I read it, it gave me goosebumps because I am a firm believer that art has this power.
Lucy: Yeah.
Eli: It has the power to heal and to connect and to to make a huge difference. I'd love to hear your thoughts about that.
Lucy: I'm going to go at that in the negative. I totally agree with that. I wrote it. I feel it. But like. I went to this, so I'm part of an artists group, which for me is really scary because you've got to go and We had a field day yesterday and we went to a couple of exhibitions, three little exhibitions.
Lucy: and all of the art just left me cold.
Lucy: It was just, it didn't do that thing that I was writing about there.
Lucy: Like the descriptions of the artists and their work and their practice was so intellectual, so highfalutin and overdone and and it didn't leave any space for
Lucy: for the mystery to emerge for the emergent to come through for any sort of engagement between you and what they had created because there was this like mind wall around it and that's very much how art in our culture is at the moment it has to be clever.
Lucy: And people who just paint pictures of flowers or people or sea or abstracts aren't being clever enough. You have to be really... And it's like, no. Like, they might have got themselves a position in this exhibition and that might be really prestigious. but the art did nothing. And I felt kind of a bit, I didn't want to be slagging off other artists.
Lucy: I'm doing it here now, and that's shitty. But I'm speaking my truth about not one particular artist, but this was eight different artists, all doing this, and working in different media, all doing the same thing, because they were in a proper formal exhibition.
Lucy: And the formality had taken over, that the art with a capital A had taken over. and
Lucy: There was nothing really that there was left of. To me.
Lucy: Creativity is something that emerges that requires me to put it into some sort of container so that the world can see it. But it's not something I make up with my head.
Lucy: It's not a clever idea I have and then I sit down and make it so the world can see how clever I am.
Lucy: That's not what creativity is. It's some deep soul psyche communication, communication from some realm which we do not have access to, that I as a creative person am putting out into the world. I am transmitting it, I am channelling it in some way. And you then receive what you need from that. It's not for me to tell you, oh this comes from the Archangel Gabriel and it means, no bollocks to that too, but it's something that
Lucy: has resonated with me that will resonate with you and you might not have words for it and I might not have words but what I think I've done might not be what you receive but there is something there that is beyond words for both of us.
Lucy: I didn't feel that in any of that art I saw yesterday and I felt really, as I said, shitty about that. And I was sitting with a group of people and I kind of said in a way that was joking, but that could have been taken seriously if it needed to be. I feel like I better make myself some better bios because I'm not nearly as fancy with my words about my work as those people. And another woman said, oh God, no, please don't. They were just, and this conversation happened. And all of us, and there were art therapists. There were people who worked in film and painting and movement and words. All of us around that table had been left completely cold by that art. And we're all people who create for our livings. And it didn't resonate with us as what we understand creativity to be.
Eli: That's fascinating.
Lucy: And yet that's what most people are exposed to in most gallery spaces and whatever, because they're the people making the money. They're the people who've been approved of by patriarchal capitalist culture. Art is very much seen as something that can be traded for money and increases in value because of its reputation, not because of what it does.
Lucy: And there is some work, like, for example, Van Gogh's, that is like, it yeah like resonates so strongly and everybody can feel that. And it's going to open up in value because people recognize that but there's a lot of other stuff that
Lucy: I think it leaves most people cold. But it's just that that person has got a reputation and they know how to navigate the system and they had the right people buying at the right time.
Lucy: And so we've learned that this is art. This is what creativity does. And it's like, no, not for me.
Eli: No, me either. I think there's a huge chasm between the art world and art. I mean, I say it a lot. Like I think most art is crap these days. I mean no shade to the artists that everybody's doing their best and trying to work within the system that we've that we've got. But I am always, whenever I go to see art, so ready for awe. and Every now and again, I see a piece that knocks my socks off.
Lucy: And you can't move from it and you're like there and you're getting closer and closer. Your nose is almost on it trying to see the brush strokes and trying to get it.
Eli: And it makes me weep. It's a visceral reaction.
Eli: I was standing in the middle of the gallery, like tears pouring down my face going like this.
Lucy: Yeah.
Eli: This is what it's all about.
Lucy: And often it will be by somebody and you have no idea who they were.
Eli: Yeah
Lucy: And, you know, they might be long dead. They might be contemporary. You don't know their story. You don't, you haven't read any fucking description. You just, this piece of art just whomp and it like brings you straight into the room and everything starts moving around you and you are just there with it. And thought that, that's, I think that's what all artists and creative people live for is that feeling and it's just sad that, you know, we don't, and you know, I went, we were in France a few weeks ago and we went into a church, you know, just to look around and I'm not religious in in any way nowadays.
Lucy: And, you know, we were just stepping in just because we were tourists.
Lucy: And I got that, that warmth. There was, they were playing on really, really good quality speakers, plain chant, by male voices in this space and literally my husband and I just couldn't move. We just stood there as it just washed through us. I'm getting chills just even telling you about it. It's just, you know, it's that and you can't put that into your work by being clever because that doesn't come from your little human brain.
Eli: No.
Lucy: You can shape it cleverly.
Lucy: You can find ways to market it cleverly so people can find it, but you can't, you can't fake that.
Eli: No, no, no, you have to make the work pure.
Lucy: That's the real truth.
Lucy: no And that's that's the endless challenge of being creative because your ego is always trying to get in the way. Your deadlines are always getting in the way. Your vision of what you think the project should be is always getting in the way.
Lucy: Your general lack of skills or capabilities in whatever area will always get in the way. but It's that thing that's at the very core of it. that I think what people get from my books, and my books are not for everybody, like they're a niche audience, but the people who resonate with my books, they they communicate that back to me, that that is what they got from it.
Lucy: Like my books are not just a bunch of words. My books are things that people will throw across the room because it's made them so angry. Or they will hide the book so that they don't have to see it because they're struggling with it.
Lucy: Or they will carry it with them in their bags because they don't want to leave it behind. Or they will tattoo the words on their body. You know, it's it's that. And that's not me. That's coming through me, but that's not me. I just make space for that and I'm used to communing with that, but it's not of me.
Lucy: I'm just very, very, very privileged that it's become my life's work to deliver those seeds of what I get out into the world. And I am changed by them first and foremost, every time.
Eli: Oh, that's just magic. And makes my next question seem incredibly prosaic.
Lucy: Go on. I love changing, I love hair brain changing tactics and yeah, go, go.
Eli: Yeah, let's do it, let's do it. For anybody who's listening...
Lucy: What colour are your knickers, Lucy? Black.
Eli: For anyone who's listening to your story and going like, yes, yes, yes, like this is what I feel when I make my work. This is what I'm trying to achieve. What advice would you give to people who are then trying to translate that into something that's marketable and something that can communicate with people who maybe don't get the opportunity to stand in front of the work, who maybe don't, are frightened of art, who don't know how to appreciate it? like What's your advice for bridging the gap?
Lucy: Well, first you have to find the people who are gonna love the work. So you need to be, I mean, I'm not into law of attraction except in this sort of thing where it's like, you have to be attracting the right people to you.
Lucy: You have to be yourself because the second that you're out there being masked and being what you think you should be, you'll be attracting people to you who will then be all disgusted and affronted when you actually, you actually, share the truth of who you are. They're like, Oh no, that's not what I was wanting. I was wanting this nice, pretty, one second. I'm going to plug my thing in. So that, and, then Theodor Roosevelt had this quote that I've like totally taken on for every area of my life. And my three children have actually, they know it and repeat it back to me. So it's gone into their brains too. And I know it's like, oh God, that's what my mom says.
Eli: Have fun.
Lucy: But actually they've taken it on and I hope it will stand them as and in as good stead as it did for me. And it is do what you can with what you have where you are. So to me that always means wherever you are, whether you're in bed with the curtains closed and you can't see another human, there is something you can do with this moment. It might be to journal about how it feels. It might be to create a series of art about what this experience is.
Lucy: It might be to get onto your phone and to post something to social media. There is always something you can do, wherever you are, with whatever materials you have, however your day is today, there is something that you can do towards whatever it is that you are longing for and dreaming of. What I've learned through talking to creative people. And this is the thing I love most about my work is it brings into my orbit like-minded creative people, especially women.
Eli: Yeah
Lucy: and I get to have conversations like this. That's why I started my podcast, Creative Magic, so that I could have the conversations with the women who I've been working with and around, but I've never actually been able to talk about the creative process with. And that to me is everything, to be able to do that. So, oh, I just, I just diverged myself.
Lucy: How do I bring myself back? It was, do what you can with what you have where you are creative. Gone.
Eli: I think I think you said it all, really. That's exactly it. Find your people.
Lucy: Yeah.
Eli: Alongside being an artist for many years, I've taught people about business and marketing. And that's always my number one piece of advice to anyone is whatever it is, find your people and and have those conversations and talk with them and and get that resonance going because that informs everything. And then do what you can. with what you have wherever you are. I mean, that's it, that's it. You figure it out as you go along, you take the baby steps, you learn as you go, and the conversations that you have inform you along the way. Like, I think that's...
Lucy: And there's no one path, there is no one right way. That was it. The thing that I've learned from talking to many women is that your calling, your dream, wants you as much as you want it. Like it's a sacred thing and it's a two-way process.
Lucy: It's not just you're out there grasping for all the things you can get. No, this deep, sacred calling that you feel like this is the work I have to do, that I have to put it out into the world, that needs you, it wants you as much as you want it. And that is, that changes everything. That puts you in a relationality, in relationship to your calling, to your work. It gives you a responsibility. It makes you focused. It makes you not be able to be too greedy. You can't do all of the things now we've started at the beginning by saying that I do all of the things but all of the things towards one focus and purpose so I'm using all my skills and my abilities but it's towards a very clear focus and purpose I'm not and I used to try to be this and that and now I'm like no no no I really I really get it and I'm really kind of honing in on that and so I think that changes everything getting really clear on what it is you're trying to do who you're trying to do it for. And that brings that closer to you in some weird, energetic law of attraction, whatever you want to call it way. There is, but there is, as a creative person, you are working with the unseen.
Lucy: We as a culture do not have language for what that is and how it works. Science cannot prove it, yet artists know it to be true and always have. So we still have to work on faith that that is true and that you are working with the unseen as well as paying your taxes and posting on social media and all the this world stuff that you have to do. There is something deeper that you're doing at the same time, an energetic something.
Eli: Wow. Wow, this has been an absolutely incredible conversation, Lucy. I'm so grateful to you for coming onto this podcast and sharing your wisdom with us. It's been absolutely magnificent.
Lucy: You're very welcome.
Eli: Where can people find you if, as I'm sure they will, if they want to know more about you and the work you're doing in the world?
Lucy: So my website is www.lucyhpearce.com and that has got, you know, a bit of a bio on me, it's got all my books and about them, it's got lots of other podcast interviews with me, it's got information, you know, it's got a blog on it, all of that sort of thing. Womancraft Publishing is where you will find signed copies of my books and all of our other author's books and more about the Womencraft Project.
Lucy: And I'm on social media as Lucy H. Pearce on Facebook, which I'm kind of me about, and Instagram, which I love. And Woman Craft Publishing is also there. And yeah, I'm just out there in the world doing my thing. I've got a new class coming up called Peaceful Patterns 2, White on Black. Peaceful Patterns 1 ran last autumn and was very popular. There were about 75 women. It's like doodle art, but it's far more focused.
Lucy: We just work with one shape each time.
Eli: You.
Lucy: and really work with the energetics of that shape, the spiritual meaning of that shape, how it's found in nature. And through that kind of connection to that energetic, you then create beautiful patterns, building them up just one shape at a time. It's very meditative, very calming, really great for neurodivergent people. So I will be doing that. I'm just about to make my video for it. Actually, look, I can show you some showing is easier than
Eli: Sounds delicious.
Lucy: So we're talking about this sort of thing.
Eli: Oh, that's beautiful.
Eli: Wow, that's absolutely gorgeous.
Lucy: So I will be teaching that starting September 3rd and they are fortnightly sessions for six weeks and you get the recording too if you can't make it live. And it's a really lovely way of just gathering in community and creating together and learning together. So people can buy that on the woman craft publishing site under the e-courses tab.
Eli: Fantastic. I'll put all of the links in the show notes below. So if you're curious about any of this, go to the show notes and you'll find all of Lucy's links there.
Lucy: Fabulous.
Eli: Thank you so much, Lucy. This has been absolutely amazing.
Lucy: Thank you, Eli.