When I moved into higher education and academia, I had already been a creative practitioner for more than fifteen years. I had also spent many years teaching, both formally and informally. I came into academia with a rich body of technical knowledge, industry experience and personal creative practice, yet in those early years, I often struggled to find the right balance between the different parts of who I was.
My creative journey had never been limited to one particular area. Over more than twenty years, I had explored almost every part of fashion and creative practice that interested me. I had worked with womenswear, menswear, occasionwear and wedding dresses. I had explored garment construction, pattern cutting, fashion illustration, fabric dyeing, batik, painting, drawing and many other forms of making.
I had built a broad and deeply personal creative practice through years of experimentation, learning and doing. Creativity was not simply something I taught. It was something I had lived.
However, when I entered academia, I sometimes felt that I needed to hide that part of myself.
I was progressing academically and doing well, but I often found myself playing down my creative abilities. There was a part of me that worried that showing too much creativity, technical skill or practical experience might make people take me less seriously as an academic.
It felt as though my creative self had been placed in a corner. That side of me was still present, but it was covered and contained because I believed my academic identity needed to remain at the forefront.
What I did not understand at the time was that I did not have to choose.
Being a creative did not take anything away from my identity as an academic. My practical knowledge did not make me less intellectual. My love for colour, fashion, making and experimentation did not make my academic work less serious.
For a long time, academia was often presented as something very formal and restrained: serious faces, plain shirts and trousers, very little fun and perhaps a pair of strange-looking glasses.
Although I must say, my own glasses are always fun.
The world has changed, and academia continues to change with it. Academia is about knowledge, enquiry, discovery and the different ways we understand and contribute to the world. Creative practice has a place within that world. Making has a place. Teaching has a place. Design, experimentation, storytelling and lived experience all have a place.
Discovering the identity of the creative academic felt like a new lease of life.
Before then, I never really knew how to introduce myself. Was I a fashion designer? A lecturer? A teacher? A creative practitioner? A researcher? An academic?
I often found myself using several sentences simply to explain what I did.
Finding the words creative academic allowed everything to come together. For the first time, I felt that I had found language that made space for all parts of me.
A significant part of that discovery came during my pedagogy studies at the University for the Creative Arts. Studying creative education was one of the best decisions I made for my professional and personal development. I am especially grateful to Nicolai and to the conversations we had in class about identity, practice and education.
Those conversations helped me recognise that my creativity and my academic practice were not separate identities competing for space. They were connected. They could strengthen, challenge and inform one another.
Today, I understand that creative practice is not something that sits outside my academic work. It is an important part of my teaching, research, enquiry and innovation.
As a creative academic, practice and scholarship continually feed one another. My experience as a maker shapes the questions I ask as a researcher. My academic work helps me examine and understand my creative and educational practice more deeply. My teaching creates further opportunities to test ideas, learn from others and develop new ways of thinking.
There is something very special about that fusion.
Creative academics occupy a unique space. We make, question, teach, research, experiment and reflect. We communicate knowledge not only through words but also through objects, processes, images, materials, experiences and creative outcomes.
Finding my place as a creative academic has been one of the most beautiful parts of my career.
I no longer feel the need to hide one side of myself so that the other can be taken seriously. I no longer need to choose between introducing myself as a designer, lecturer, teacher, researcher or academic.
I can be all of them.
I am now living in the fullness of both my creativity and my academic identity, without holding either of them back.
This is me: a proud creative academic, bringing together the beauty of creative skill and practice with education, research and innovation.
What a wonderful world.
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