Today I am talking with Gemma Donnellan who is an artist and art curator, a creator of community and a natural born network. Gemma has a gift of bringing people together around art. Gemma began her career as an artist which she has created over time whilst working full time and also being a stay at home parent. She has spent many years painting, in community, before moving back into a curatorial role, bringing emerging and established artists together in exhibitions.

Gemma is skilled in how she pulls together different artists to curate art shows of diverse pieces of art that seem to have a common thread running through them that you can only work out once you have looked at all the paintings.

She has created networks for women to come together around art in her quarterly sessions she calls Reciprocity, where ideas are shared, provocative conversations created around topics of interest.

In the podcast we talked about:

Art as a support for all of us in tough times and the healing power of art,
We talked about the creativity that exists within all of us and expressed in our own unique ways,
The healing power of art and how we can express what sits deeply within us, bypassing the rational part of our brain and express from the deepest parts of ourselves,
How to choose art for your own personal collection. Whilst buying art can be overwhelming we don’t have to buy the most expensive piece but rather what speaks to us and evokes an emotional response.

You can find Gemma at www.artfortoday.com.au, on instagram @artfortoday and facebook

Grief is one of the toughest emotions that most of us have to feel and work through. In our culture we seem to have lost our way when it comes to expressing grief. We have really narrowed our understanding of what being human really means and that includes the emotions we let ourselves feel. Establishing a relationship with our grief and being able to stay present with it in our adult selves is one of the learning challenges of working with sorrow, sadness and grief. It is part of our maturation into our elderhood that we learn to befriend and express grief. To develop structures that support us to hold it and work with it in the community.

In this episode my friend and colleague Ellen Clarke and I talk through all the ways that grief can come into our lives and the challenges we have in being able to let ourselves fall into the belly of it.

In this podcast you will hear us talk about:

Death and how in the western world we expect to wake up and be alive each day;

Grief is part of our transition through our rites of passage in life that the expression of it helps us let go of parts of ourselves that we don’t need anymore and birth new parts of ourselves. That in midlife learning to connect with our emotions allows us to transition into our emotional adulthood;
We can experience grief after severe illness or life threatening experiences in conjunction with gratitude and this can be a lonely and confusing experience;
Without any structures, supports or containers to hold us, it feels too wieldy and scary to let it flow. If we had someone who is a non-griever shepherding us through it how might that be for us?;
If we got good at letting ourselves feeling the little moments of sadness and disappointment each day this might help us deal with the bigger feelings of grief and it might actually be a highly connected experience for us;
Grief can feel like an emotional rollercoaster (we both hate rollercoasters by the way) and pinging all over the place in our nervous system can feel like we have no foundations;
There is often fear and shame wrapped over the top of those emotions that we stuff under our proverbial rug and this can make what we are feeling feel really murky and hard to connect with.

You can find Ellen at her website www.ellenmay.com.au on instagram at @ellenismagic or on facebook