What is mark-making? Mark-making is a natural part of our early childhood development process- which means, if you are here reading this, then you most likely practiced this as a child, (maybe you still do), maybe in ways we weren't consciously aware of-drawing in our plates of food with our fingers, making shapes in the sand with seashells, scribbling on walls with crayons, making lines in soil with twigs, splashing rainwater in street puddles, fogging up windows to trace lines and dots- and in numerous other ways, noticing the imprints of our interactions with the world.
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Mark-making is a natural part of our early childhood development process- drawing in our plates of food with our fingers, making shapes in the sand with seashells, scribbling on walls with crayons, making lines in soil with twigs, splashing rainwater in street puddles, fogging up windows to trace lines and dots.
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As children when we made marks likes this, we started to experience the agency that flows through us- to initiate a movement and see its literal imprint in our environment.
Often mark-making is an embodied practice that engages our full being. When we see children in this process, we might notice they are sensing, feeling, listening with their whole body to the worlds in/around them, connected and playful, channeling through hands, limbs into dots, lines, shapes, patterns- marks of various types- a simultaneous process in seeing, perceiving, imaging, mapping, moving, and more.
This kind of mark-making is a deeply creative practice- not in any grand sense but in the creative life-force of the lived everyday that courses through each one of our veins. It is not so much an exercise with an agenda or outcome for how it needs to 'look', but rather an embodied, explorative engagement at the intersection of our physical bodies and the environment- to notice our own responsive-ness, our porosity- a process of simultaneously yielding into and pushing against edges and boundaries, to feel the shape of the world.
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This kind of mark-making is a deeply creative practice- not in any grand sense but in the creative life-force of the lived everyday that courses through each one of our veins.
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Fostering our innate creative impulses in this way often becomes a powerful resource as we grow up- many of us may have experienced this- that when we’re painting, drawing, making music- creating anything- we experience a quality of aliveness, vitality that can support us to navigate stress! And cultivating creative practices in this way is shown to support long-term resilience- the ability to bounce back from challenging experiences.
At FieldSanctuary, we expand upon this practice of creative mark-making in our Somatic ‘Auto-colouring’ Circles through a guided open-ended, playful unfurling process- in sensation, rhythm, and flow.
-Bindu D