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You are here: Home / Creativity / Be Creative but Beware The Unicorns!

September 6, 2017 By @barryjohansen

Be Creative but Beware The Unicorns!

 Finding time to be creative

In this mad crazy world trying to find balance between businesses, creativity and marketing is challenging! It is hard to stay focused especially when distracted by all the unicorns that keep running by! Sometimes if can be a challenge to be creative.
 
One minute you are working on a creative project when an idea you thought would work has morphed into something completely different! That is what has happened to me with my Dragons Gate project. I have every intention of taking this project to an exhibition and though hey wouldn’t it be great if it incorporated both tangible and digital elements. And that’s when I got distracted by a unicorn.
 

The Dragons Gate

If you aren’t aware The Dragon’s Gate is an asian folk story about Koi Carp and emulated in Brisbane’s China Town Mall in various ways. A 3 metre high statue by Catherine Chui and a lit modern dragon gate at the Ann Street end of the Mall. There are a lot of other subtle elements   the water feature and seating allude to the story of swimming up stream.
Inspiration that allows one to be creative can be found almost anywhere.
 
The story is about the tenacity of the asian communities who overcome adversity. In some cases becaming the fabric that held rural towns together during the gold rush years of the 1800. And there goes another unicorn…

Something Tangible

Fabric, it’s tangible but what to do with it, make it into garments? After all asian business men ran general stores in the towns they settled in. And of course there are the fabrics used to decorate the Chinese restaurants that started popping up in country towns. There were three in town when I grew up.
Digital art is one one way that allows me creative. Barry Johansen - The Pool of Seventy One
 
The elements that inspired have are captured on a dedicated Facebook page, and that is how I drifted onto thinking about “plabric” but that is a whole other unicorn now…

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