Profiling creativity: an exploration of the creative process through the practice of freelance print journalism

This PhD research project comprises two parts: a creative project and an exegesis. The creative project component of the research consisted of writing a series of 20 character profiles titled Profiling Creativity, with each feature article based on a different creative practitioner and their experience of the creative process. The individuals profiled were drawn from a variety of practices, some traditionally associated with creativity and others not, in order to demonstrate the diversity of creativity as detailed in current literature on the subject. Similarly, each profile highlights a different concept or aspect within the scholarly literature, as demonstrated by that particular practitioner’s experience. Engaging in the practice of freelance print journalism in this way provided me with two sources for exploring creativity: the accounts of the 20 practitioners interviewed for the profiles and my own experience of the creative process in writing the series. This research was conducted using the methodology of practitioner based enquiry (PBE), and in keeping with this methodology I kept a research journal that documents the process of creating Profiling Creativity and provides evidence for my practice. In this way, I was able to compare my experience of creativity with that of the practitioners interviewed for the profiles and apply current literature on creativity to these findings. The details of this analysis are contained in the exegesis component of this project. Most specifically, this research explores the nature of creativity through the theoretical framework of Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model of creativity. In contrast to popular conceptions of creativity that place the individual at the centre of the process, this model proposes that creativity instead emerges from the interplay of three components: the individual, the field (society) and the domain (culture). By applying this framework to my own experience and that of the 20 cultural producers interviewed for Profiling Creativity this research aims to illustrate and validate the underlying systemic nature of creativity, as it applies to all creative practice, and the necessity of accounting for all three components in explanations of the creative process.