Phillipa Stanton’s Conscious Creativity Cards are a pack of 104 cards of eight suits, thirteen colours each (left), plus two jokers, one of which is Stanton’s cat (right).
The cards have an image on one side and a short phrase on the other. They are packaged in a good quality box listing their three primary intentions (Notice Connect Coincidence) and come with a 32 page booklet of whys, whats and hows.
These cards follow on from Conscious Creativity, Stanton’s 2018 manual on how to cultivate creativity in your everyday life. They are intended “to help precipitate subtle changes in everyday life by exercising observation, imagination and memory, mostly through the lens of chance and coincidence” (p. 4).
Though Stanton says there is no fixed way to use the cards, she does offer some suggestions to get started with them (pp. 7, 20-21). You can:
1) pick a daily random card and let its picture and words prompt your thoughts and observations;
2) pick four random cards and reflect on the ways their images connect and, later, the ways their words connect;
3) pick one suit to work with, and find the corresponding observations in your life;
4) pick one colour to work with, and observe or collect your version of each card;
5) create random poetry.
If none of these activities take your fancy, Stanton says the cards can be used to play snap, the Pelmanism game, and eye spy.
I spent five days with the cards trying out Stanton’s suggestions for their use, and getting to know how they might be helpful for creativity and more broadly for perception.
Day 1: Pick one card
On my first attempt I pulled the black lines card. I did not like its industrial scene, the old tyres, grey and ugly. The card looked like winter. I wanted to pull a different one, but Stanton says you must commit to the card you select, "even if it doesn't feel relevant, appear to have purpose, or be what you thought you needed" (p. 7).
I read the words: ‘Make it ambiguous’. I reflected on the ways my creative work utilises ambiguity. I laid the card down on a table, picture up. When I came back into the room I noticed how the purple walls pulled purple out of the black and grey image. Later, I noticed the pattern on a certain plant’s leaf looked like tyre tracks. I found an old tyre in a friend’s garden, turned inside out and painted silver for a flower pot.
The card’s image was subtly present throughout the day, and my eyes picked out tyres and tyre tracks. I can only assume that I would not have noticed these had I not been primed by the image to do so. Finding the silver tyre was a coincidence, but not a meaningful one.
Day 2. Pick one card
As Day 1's attempt had left me feeling so flat, I tried the same activity again, this time pulling pink shadows. This was more like it. I was going through a neon punk colour phase, and the card excited me. I read the phrase: ‘Look out of the window’. I could do that.
I looked out the window for pink all the way down on a long country drive. The longer we went the more frustrated I became, as there was no pink in my vision. I noticed that the colour palettes of the towns and suburbs we drove through were monochromatic and washed out, and I longed for the colours of Fiji. My frustration that the activity ‘wasn’t working’ and my dislike of the colours of the country I now live in could both prompt further discussion.
As I edit this weeks later I’m still remembering to look out the window. Yesterday I remembered to look out the window in time to glimpse a person dressed in a homemade beekeeper’s costume, wrangling a bee colony from a couch at a road-side rubbish pickup. Worth it.
Day 3: Four random cards
I shuffled, closed my eyes, and pulled out four cards non-sequentially. Stanton says to reflect on the way the four images (and later, the four sayings) interconnect. My brain said, ‘I’m supposed to make a story from this?!’ But that isn't what Stanton's prompt calls for, so I thanked my brain and looked carefully at the cards.
Briefly, I came up with: All are layered. There is a front image, and there is an image beneath that. Grey is repeated across all four cards. Three of four cards contain straight lines, and somewhere within all four of them there are shapes that come to a point.
Paying close attention in this way drew out elements of the images that were not immediately obvious. Further reflection would generate more connections, probably not limited to the concrete images. Though the pressure to make a story from the cards was intimidating and had to be set aside, the exercise is useful for story telling. The practice of paying close attention can only benefit descriptive writing.
Stanton's instructions are to turn the cards over later in the day. From the second flip I noticed pattern: these are messages for someone stuck in a rut. A breath is a mini-break, a cup of tea a slightly longer mini-break. The advice to leave perfection behind is sound advice, because a person seeking perfection can't take a break. And how hot is too hot? Well, a cup of tea that scalds your tongue is too hot. So I'd better go sit with that hot cup of tea I'm about to make until it's cool enough to drink; a slightly longer, slightly longer mini-break.
Day 4: My version of a card
Stanton suggests picking one colour to work on, observing or collecting your own version of the cards. She also suggests the same task for suits. These tasks, I admit, I did accidentally, and backward.
The cards will break out of their assigned days, converge, and produce a new sight. Sitting at a local café, I saw my own version of the black lines card in the world around me. Though it isn't strictly black lines, it's close enough. I wouldn't have noticed this arrangement of greys if I hadn't pulled the grey tyre card on day one, and had I not still been thinking 'Look out the window' from day two.
Thinking about colour led me to notice the different greys of the puddles on the wood, the sky, the screws, and the metal beams. Thinking about lines allowed me to appreciate the interplay of lines in my view, the wood lines running this way, the screw lines running that way, and the metal beams running up and down until bent on the reflection from the wet surface.
Day 5: Random poetry
Without looking, I chose seven cards from the stack, then read through the phrases and arranged the cards in the way that felt right to me.
"Scent Over Sense"
Satisfy your thirst / tea but not coffee / it's not true but it's useful //
Nuts / where did you leave footprints / empty //
This task can be completed with images or words, or a combination of both, and is similar in concept to the spirit poem. Though I wrote poetry in my youth I gave it up. This style of composition allows me back into poetry without performance pressure. The written poem didn't lead me to great insights, but it was enjoyable. The visual poem was more ephemeral, and I treated the cards as I would Gali Salpeter's projective Roads cards, attaching one to the next. Evidently I need to work more on visual poetry, but ordering the images in this way was relaxing.
*****
My experience of the cards over these five days supports Stanton’s purposes for their use. We can become stuck in patterns. Reflecting on the drawn cards can help us break out of these perceptual ruts to see new things, and thereby think new things. The cards may evoke abstract and random feelings or thoughts. They may also prime you to be more open to meaningful coincidence. I've developed other uses for the cards since working through Stanton's prompts. These cards will be a useful tool for people who are trying not to be ‘stuck in their head’, for artists and writers, and for therapists. The cards will be equally helpful if used for creative projects or to generate reflections that can be brought into the counselling room.
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