Exploring creative chaos

March 5th 2024 | Lahari Indraganti

Photos from Lahari Indraganti’s MIDWEEK practice titled: “Creative Chaos: Randomness in Art”.

I’ve found that facilitating MIDWEEK has helped me better understand the rituals I love.

As a Program Fellow, my work focuses on supporting MIDWEEK programming, from finding facilitators to facilitating sessions myself. With the last MIDWEEK I held, I sought a practice that would help me better understand myself.

I settled on “Creative Chaos: Randomness in Art,” filled with activities like drawing with less-dominant hands, newspaper poetry, and dice coloring neurographic art. As an anxious person, I often have a hard time accepting mistakes and changes in my life, and I hoped this practice could help me confront those things in a fun way.

Participants giggled along as we drew “Death and the Miser” by Hieronymus Bosch with our less-dominant hands, filling the room with chaotic joy. Folks shared their drawings and how they felt uninhibited using their less-dominant hands.

It was incredible to see folks’ creative juices continue to flow as they wrote poetry out of random pages of the newspaper they were handed. We had everything from angsty, Tumblr-style poetry out of the classifieds, to funny, effervescent verse from the local news section. There was copious laughter as everyone eagerly shared their poems. In the true spirit of chaos, we ran out of time before we were able to get to the third activity, but what we were able to do together was phenomenal!

This experiment pushed me out of my comfort zone, revealing the beauty of unpredictability and the joy of spontaneous creation. I learned to appreciate the process of making art without a predetermined outcome, and that sometimes the most profound art comes from letting go and embracing the unknown.