Creating Outside The Box: Pushing the limits of your creative media

Klea McKenna's work offers clues as to how pushing the limits of our usual creative media causes our creative voice to resonate more strongly. 

Klea McKenna is not only the photographic half of the duo behind In The Make - a wonderful website documenting the lives of artists through interviews conducted with them in their studios - but also an artist in her own right. 

When is a photographer not a photographer?
I say artist rather than photographer because, although she uses photographic media as her starting point, Klea's technique is a long way from point and shoot using 

'...light-sensitive materials and hand-made cameras (among other techniques) to create photographic images. Her process is very hands-on, very unpredictable…[and she] does the bulk of her work outside in the realm of the natural world and then returns to the darkroom to see what she’s recorded.'

Work in progress from the Archipelago series by Klea McKenna, 2013

See examples of her work and read more about Klea here. 

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My current explorations of crayon resist with liquid watercolours

How you could push your chosen medium to its limits? 
Ask yourself:

• How do I like my creative process to feel/what qualities do I want it to have? 
  
• What stages do I need to make my creative process feel complete?
  
• What parts of my creative process make me feel empowered/strong/confident? Why?
  
• What parts of my creative process scare me? Why?
  
• What parts of my creative process push me to the edge of my creative capabilities?
  
• How could I enlarge the scope of the materials I already use regularly? Change the relative quantities/rearrange the order of their application?

You don't need to answer these questions now. It is enough to let them percolate though your subconscious. Of course, if answers come to you immediately, explore them!

Do share your thoughts/findings via the comments.