Feeding your body with creativity with Jeremy Mayall
It was an exciting moment for me when I stumbled across Jeremy. Husband, father, and CEO of Creative Waikato. Jeremy knows intimately how to use the turn-key of music and creativity to initiate wellness. Collaboration is at the very center of everything that he does in his multisensory projects. His recent work includes collaborating with musicians, dancers, poets, aerial silk performers, theater practitioners, scientists, perfumers, bakers, authors, sculptors, filmmakers, pyro-technicians, lighting designers, and video artists. Jeremy is a real advocate for the arts. We're thrilled to learn about his deep passion for the creative space and the benefits culture and creativity contribute to overall wellness.
So, I was reading recently when researching this topic that engaging in creativity is a multisensory experience involving our touch, sight, hearing, and smell. The process involves interacting with materials, tools, and using physical movement. It's a whole mind, whole body experience, which helps restore a healthy balance to the mind and body. Can you tell me a little bit more about this?
Jeremy Mayall:
That's a realization that came into my creative practice over a period of time. The more you realize that the whole way we live as humans is multisensory in every single moment, wherever we are, we're having a multisensory experience. We're potentially just selecting one of the sensors to focus on rather than others.
So, as we're here in this room, we're seeing one another, we're hearing the sounds, we're feeling the chair that we're sitting on, we're hearing the resonance in the room, potentially tasting the coffee that you had just before you came in. All of those things filter the way that we live and experience and kind of alter the way that we perceive the world around us.
So, when making art, with that in mind, it means that you can really change the way that people engage with creativity as being something that triggers all of those sensors in a really powerful way. And modern culture is a very visual, sensory-dominated culture. The powerful connections that sound, smell and taste have for our memory and for our brain function is just deeply profound and you can kind of smell something and immediately recall where you first smelt it or it brings up these positive memories or bad memories or any kind of memories. And the same thing with sound. You can hear a song that you haven't heard for 20 years, and you can remember where you first heard it and the lyrics and the way that the guitar solo sounds and it's immediate. It's not a conscious thing. It's deeply kind of connected into emotions and sense of self and sense of connection. The more that we actively engage both as participatory kind of creators and even as audience members with arts culture and creativity in all its forms, it has these profound otherworldly connections.
You can’t really describe it in words, but actually the experience of experiencing it is so much more than that and affects you in so many different ways.
Good Change:
Do you think some people are more sensory than others? Or is it something that you can really train and nourish?
Jeremy Mayall:
I think both. There are certainly people who are more naturally attuned to it. We are all multisensory. We just choose to notice it. It's a mindfulness thing. The more we actively notice it, the more we become attuned into the way that that affects us, the way that it affects our posture, the way that we think, or the way that we are feeling. So, you can start by engaging in those moments or trying to be present in an experience. Where you are in that room or in that space and really trying to connect with that thing and what it means to you. You start to unlock the doors to that.
How does it resonate with you? Do you find an emotional connection to it? Does it bring up certain memories or certain ideas? And so, if you can become present in those moments, you unlock this entire different world of understanding and reward and kindness and warmth. It’s just this transformative experience.
Good Change:
It makes for a much richer life. I wonder if they should teach this more in schools to children because I know I used to go to the forest with the kids when they were really little and we'd just lie on crackling leaves and I'd say to them “Listen and be really quiet. I want you to tell me five sounds that you can hear.” And with the busyness of life, you don't realize that there's a little bird tweeting over there and there's a crackle of a leaf over there except when you are present in the environment.
Jeremy Mayall:
Our ears are amazing filters, and they constantly filter out layers of noise so that we can focus on the conversation that we're trying to have in a crowded room or listen for your child crying from across a party. We become very unconsciously attuned to filter things out. It's very rare to find somewhere that's truly silent. Even in completely silent rooms, there's noise.
Good Change:
I know there's these feel good neurotransmitters released when you engage in creative activities. Do you think this is something that should be used more readily around depression and anxiety and that kind of thing?
Jeremy Mayall:
Definitely 100%. There have been some really amazing studies. In the UK there's a program of ‘arts prescription’. Doctors would prescribe arts activity. So, you'd go and see your doctor and sit down and they'd make an appointment with you with someone from within the arts community, and they’d find out if you like singing or painting or acting, or whatever. Then you’d receive a prescription to do those classes or to have those experiences as a way to serve your mental and physical health.
There's really powerful connections between brain function and physical function and these amazing studies that if you are going to the gym and it's silent, you can do a certain amount of things. So, music that makes you feel something helping you lift more weight, run farther. It actually gives you physical strength. In a way it's just really powerfully profound. So, we have to see it as being habit. That kind of engaging with arts and culture and creativity is a daily thing that we should be doing to be healthy and whole humans in the same way that we sleep, in the same way that we spend time with family and in the same way that we eat.
One of the really interesting things about art is that there is art for everyone, but not necessarily all artists for everyone. And so, you may not like a certain thing, but that doesn't mean you don't like art. It means you don't like that specific thing.
Good Change:
And it kind of begs the question as well of what is art and what does each individual perceive as art?
Jeremy Mayall:
It's all to do with perception. We typically use the phrase arts, culture, and creativity as a kind of more all-encompassing thing. It's drawing, it's painting, it's singing, it's dancing, it's photography and it's filmmaking. It's working with fabric and it's working with clay, and it's working with design of spaces and light and taste and all these different facets and creative activities. They can be works of art and they can be utilitarian and they can be somewhere on a continuum between those things. All of that is valuable.
Good Change:
Do you think creativity makes you feel more present? I know we touched on this, a little bit earlier. I feel like I’m calmer and more mindful when I'm doing something creative. When I can focus on the present moment, not the past, not the future. It can disengage me from any sort of worrying thoughts. What are your thoughts on this?
Jeremy Mayall:
I think so, being present and active creativity enables us to get into the flow state and we can lose perception of time and can just kind of go into this kind of space of being in that moment of exploration, being in tuned with that time and space, and it's about listening and looking and seeing and experiencing and reacting.
As soon as we engage in that critical element in the moment of creation, we step away from being present and we step into being outside of ourselves.
Good Change:
So what do you do personally to feed your creative soul or feed your creativity?
Jeremy Mayall:
Playing the piano is the thing for me. I can play for hours and have played gigs for many hours. But also going for a walk is a really great thing and hanging out with my son and seeing him create. But I think also for me, I’m fortunate enough to have this thing where my work is as an artist and a creative professional and it serves my wellbeing. But when you can get into those spaces, that moment of creation, that's the other part of the joy of collaboration for me. It’s a shared experience and I can feed off the generosity and creativity of other people and it becomes a flowing conversation.
Good Change:
We mentioned in the introduction around you collaborating with all these different types of people, one of them being a baker. Can you tell me about that?
Jeremy Mayall:
I was the composer and resident at Otago University for a couple of years. And my family moved to Dunedin. We went to the Otago Museum and they have a tropical rainforest in there, which just seems really kind of weird. Dunedin is a cold place and you walk in and it's this super warm humid room. It's a butterfly sanctuary and you could walk around and they flutter around you. I was just really struck by this space and wanted to make some kind of creative experience that existed in that room and was looking around and found that they had an indoor waterfall.
They also had these speakers hidden amongst foliage playing and creating this jungle ambience. I talked to the museum and they were really interested in taking this idea I had. We had life performance in there and so then the more I was thinking about it I realized: I've got dancers, I've got a visual focus, I've got musicians, I've got sound.
You don’t sit down, you walk around and explore the performance area. You explored the rainforest and so you'd be moving around the space. It's really humid and you feel the heat in that room. So, that kind of element of touch is covered.
The room had a really particular smell. From the smell of the plants, plus also the water and humidity, and also they feed the butterflies a little sweet fruit. It was kind of a weird sweet, watery, humidity smell.
When I realized that, I thought, I've got everything apart from taste. So how do I do that? So, a guy who had a truck at the farmer's market made amazing sweets and stuff. We'd been going every week. I went out to him, said “Hey, I've got this idea. I've got this piece of music. It's about 15 minutes and in three sections. I want to have a taste element to this thing. So, there's three sections there each aligned with a different color. I want to give you the music and if you feel like it, would you like to make macaroons that taste like what you think this sounds like.”
He was a bit confused at first and then enthusiastic. We went through this process and developed these different flavors and did some experiments. By the end of it, for the show, you'd be given this little handmade box and you'd open it up and there'd be three macaroons and a little card that said when the lights turn, the color of the macaroon eat. And so you'd be going through the room and the lights would turn green. It was linked to kind of interpretations of those colors, interpretations of what the kind of content of the piece was, but also looking at some scientific research that shows that the types of sound that you hear alter the way things taste. Low frequency sounds can make things taste more bitter and high frequency sounds can make things taste sweeter. The course of the music changes the nature of the taste experience by utilizing more or less of those different frequencies. So that was one example.
Good Change:
There’s an amazing artist nearby, Nicola Bennett, who paints food. So, she sees a direct correlation between the way a meal is put together with the way a piece of art is put together. So, she deconstructs the food and then just does these amazing abstract paintings.
They say creativity helps you to become more self aware and connect to the bigger picture around us. Would you agree with that?
Jeremy Mayall:
Yeah, definitely. It enables us to ask different questions and it enables us to imagine possibilities and it enables us to understand ourselves and our connections to others. Ultimately it all comes down to stories. All forms of creativity are different forms of telling stories, whether they're through painting or music or dance or theater or poetry and stories are how we understand our world. To tell stories is an inherently human thing, which to me suggests that humans are inherently creative. Some of us have forgotten how to do it.
Good Change:
So, when did you personally connect the dots between creativity and wellness?
Jeremy Mayall:
I don't know that there was necessarily a moment. It sort of slowly occurred over time. I've always loved music and art and creativity from a young age and played piano from when I was five and studied through school, but then was going to university to study law and changed my mind before the course started. I then did a Bachelor of Arts,Music,Theater and Film. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to understand what those other connections were. So, it's not just about writing this song or making this thing. How does that connect with people?
Part of that kind of emerged through my PhD study, which was looking at kind of genres between popular music and classical music and multimedia forms and then that sent me down this road of multisensory things. That made some connections with the Brain Health Research Center in Otago and we looked at the connection between sound waves and brain waves and how you can use music to alter brain function by giving us energy or relaxing us, or kind of creating these different brainwave states. And while the experiences are never exactly the same, because it is also based on who we are in our background and things, there are similarities you can explore. Then you go down this path of what the other ways are that I can help to unlock for other people and to unlock it in a way that feels safe and feels like something that you want to prioritize.
I think that's one of the tricky things is that creativity can sometimes be seen as frivolous or it can be seen as play and play is what we do as kids. Play can be what we do as adults, we just have to prioritize it and we have to make a chance for it. I think also with the way that a lot of people go through schooling and they are told ‘you can't draw’, ‘you can't sing’, or you can't, whatever. So, they stop! And they may not be artists, they may not want to make a career as an artist, but you still can get amazing value in wellbeing. So, to be creative is different to being an artist. They can be the same thing, but they don't have to be.
There's ways to embed creative practice art, making practice across all different curriculum areas. You can use it as a teaching methodology and as a way to answer questions to understand worlds. It doesn't have to be rote learning things. It can be like so many different ways to respond, and I think that will set kids up for the future that's ahead of them. Look at how the creative process allows us to bring in information and refract out possibilities and dreams. Education is a tool for life, a tool for wellbeing, a tool for everything and we can also remember that it's never too late.
There’s always time to start. It doesn't have to be a thing other than a thing for you. You don't even have to show anyone if you don't want to. You want to be soloist, join a community choir or find a way to have a fun experience with other people in the same way that we do with social sport or other things.
Good Change:
Just out of interest, when you go home and you get on the piano, do you knock out some classical tunes or are you just improvising? I suppose you've been influenced by so many different types of music over the years that anything can come out.
Jeremy Mayall:
That's the thing, I try not to think about what it is. I just play and trust my fingers and try to listen to what's happening and think. There's times where I'm sitting down and I'm writing a piece of music and that's actively kind of doing things.
Good Change:
Were your parents musical?
Jeremy Mayall:
My mum was a piano teacher. My dad not so much, but he was always super encouraging because I think he felt like he didn't have that.
Good Change:
So if you were going to give a couple of takeaways for what our audience today could take away, to really nourish their creativity, what would they be?
Jeremy Mayall:
That's a really great question.
- Make a commitment to find your art. So that's a journey, and that's something that you could do every day. You can explore a new piece of music or a new piece of art or a new video, something short. But try something new every day.
- Make time for play. So have a box of Lego or pens or something that you have and put it in your calendar. Have a 10 minute play break. Cause sometimes it's about how do I find that time?
- There’s so much stuff going on in our local communities. Go and see the shows, find the pottery classes, the music classes. They're all there. We just sometimes don't look for them.
