Aesthetic Space

Images have a very quiet voice

Lucy Mooney 1935

For a long time, the various parts of me have felt separate: I'm both an academic and a creative. I am passionate about teaching and learning, as well as creativity and the arts. As I've journeyed on my path, I've realized that it's my mission to bridge the academic and creative. Since images lie at the heart of the creative process, images also lie at the heart of learning.

I believe that my academic courses provide a strong foundation for the "legitimacy" of the arts--offering substantial evidence of their centrality in learning and cultural change. Some of these courses include Psychology of Metaphor, Psychology of Creativity, Psychology of Transformative Learning, The Purpose and Power of Image and Imaginal Ways of Knowing. (For course descriptions, go to Events & Classes page.)

I often think of image and imagination as the "language of the heart," and this language needs our support. While images are at the center of any kind of creative transformation, they have a very quiet voice. Images need to be welcomed and given space, else they will not be heard.

We're at our most creative when we actively engage with images

Florine Smith quilt 1975
Creative individuals mentally play with images all the time, no matter what field they work in. But research shows that all of us are embedded in the world of mental imagery all the time... and our cognitive systems are based in metaphor. Even individuals who define themselves as "less creative" are at their most creative when they actively engage with images.

Metaphor in Everyday Life - Workshop at Book Passage

Essie Bendolph Pettway quilt

In the case of every historic scientific discovery and invention that is researched carefully enough, we find that it was imagery, either in dreams or in a waking state, which produced the breakthrough.
--John Curtis Gowan

Humans have four ways of knowing: thinking, feeling, physical sensing, and imagination, but we tend to favor only one of these modes—thinking. Of these four modes of knowing, imagination (or image-ing) is arguably the most powerful and least understood. To shed some light on this matter, I’m teaching an upcoming workshop at Book Passage on image and metaphor. We will focus on the role of image and metaphor on the creative process, as well as its role in shaping the “lenses” that we use to view the world around us. Here’s the link to sign up:

http://bookpassage.com/event/class-kim-hermanson-metaphor-everyday-life

---------------

Metaphor in Everyday Life – Workshop
Book Passage, Corte Madera
Sunday, November 13th, 10 am-4 pm

Every aspect of our daily experience is influenced by metaphor. While writers may try to use metaphor to enrich their writing, the truth is that we are always writing (and looking) through a metaphoric lens. In this experiential workshop we explore metaphor as a potent force that shapes how we see the world. I hope you'll join us!

Pedestrian Poetry

Awhile back, David Brooks wrote a New York Times column about metaphor in everyday life. (He called it "Poetry for Everyday Life.") Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/opinion/12brooks.html?_r=1

My favorite line could be this one: Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry."