Creative restoration at B-Side Arts Festival

A few years ago, I spent several days at Dolbryn Creative Retreat in Wales where inspired by the thinking of Nora Bateson I was exploring how we might shift from a factory mindset (building tools for a desirable output) to a meadow mindset (creating environments where diversity can thrive). At the time, it all sounded beautifully poetic. And honestly, a bit intangible. 

It wasn’t until I started re-wilding my own garden that it made sense. If you just help the garden a little - don’t clear all the leaves, suddenly butterflies are hibernating under your hedge; don’t remove every weed between the paving stones and hey presto there are grasshoppers everywhere - life responds, often in ways you didn’t plan for. It’s about helping, not fixing. 

And as a creative consultant working in strategy, that’s a tricky balancing act: being useful without being overbearing, holding space whilst giving autonomy…. supporting change whilst quietly observing harm. 

I say this not because I’m constantly on the receiving end of harm but because so many people I speak to in the creative sector are. Somehow their efforts keeps tipping into burnout, conflict, or worse. It feels increasingly like a collective condition in our sector. 

So, while in Portland on this recent creative retreat with B-Side, I found myself circling back to the Do No Harm principle from humanitarian aid. I was thinking about how utopias can turn into failed cults. About how you choose to show up matters. We all know this. It’s almost a naff trope. And yet, it’s still genuinely hard. It takes huge self-awareness, active listening, and real conversation. Yet often, people are only prepared to do that work for their own communities. For others… well.

Which got me reflecting on our sector again. Socially engaged arts can be toxic too, let’s be honest. People’s activism can harden into dogma. Coping mechanisms can become permission to mistreat others.

The threat to democracy isn’t just “out there”. It exists in our cultural ecosystems as well. There can be no social change without some level of confrontation, so where are the workshops that help us learn how to talk better? Debates so often become about who used the cleverest language, who sounded the most convincing, who was clearly the best educated. The topic itself? forgotten. I don’t want to debate. I want to explore how we have a kind of conversation that can hold friction and empathy at the same time, where we unpick what needs unpicking and we still leave intact. 

Being in Portland, brought something home for me. It’s really not complicated. 

Our pain does not give us a free pass to treat others badly, without patience, or with a harshness no one deserves. And we can’t do this work without accountability and importantly (nay, crucially) without tending to our own issues. 

I recently watched a documentary where a survivor spoke about how she began to recover, not by endlessly replaying what she could have done differently, but by changing her internal monologue to: you will get through this. Her focus shifted from the past to the future. I didn’t think I needed healing from old experiences. But I realise now I’d learned how to manage it. I’d learned to stop replaying the obsessive “if only I had”. But honestly, I hadn’t learned how to let it go. I hadn’t shifted to you will get through this, I’d just learned how to block it out.  

So, if I’m serious about helping others build healthier cultural ecosystems, and if I hope others can take responsibility for their own healing and how they show up, then I have to practise what I preach. 

I called this creative retreat professional restoration, but you can’t really separate the professional from the self. So perhaps this is just the first small step in healing. For some this may feel obvious, for others it arrives in its own time.

So an unexpected outcome from the past few days and not at all the one I came for - life responds after all, often in ways you didn’t plan for.