What’s come out of
Yellow
Yellow is not about output. There are no learning objectives or desired outcomes. There is no homework. Nothing is prescribed.
But through the process of gathering and conversing, creations can’t seem to help but emerge.
We’ve been consistently surprised and delighted by what unfolds.
Here’s a selection of artwork, books, and sounds that have come out of Yellow…so far.
On Questions: A Little Booklet from Yellow
Petter, a Yellow participant, had a question about questions.
It was a prompt we couldn’t resist. So we convened a ‘Sidestream’ session to explore Petter’s questions about questions and invited everyone participating in Yellow to come along.
The result was a rich, varied, thought-provoking conversation. Rather than reaching answers or conclusions, people brought diverse perspectives that created a wealth of different insights, ideas and, inevitably, other questions.
It was something we had to share. So we made a booklet with extracts from that conversation.
Embroidery
We invited Amy Ryles to create something inspired by her experience of Yellow and to share the process with participants.
She created these embroidered pieces, inspired by the Suminagashi method.
The piece are now circulating amongst participants (an idea inspired by the Kula Ring from the Trobriand Islands in the Western Pacific).
Dinosaurs
In May 2021, Michael Garfield from the Santa Fe Institute hosted a session on “Life Lessons From Jurassic Park.”
Steve Chapman, a Yellow collaborator and participant in the session, doodled in the background as the conversation unfolded.
This was the result.
Poetry
During her journey as a Yellow participant, Aimée established a routine for herself. After every session she wrote a poem. She gave herself three constraints. Each poem had to:
1) touch on a theme, phrase, idea that occurred in the session, if only tangentially,
2) include the word ‘yellow’ in some form, and
3) be shared with the group.
Aimeé found additional inspiration for her pieces from a range of sources. For example, in her poem Yellow Wing she drew upon a New Yorker article about Marilynne Robinson, and a poem by Edward Hirsch.
“This is Robinson’s entire cosmology: the world is self-evidently miraculous, but only rarely do we pay it the attention it deserves. Robinson calls her style of writing cosmic realism, a patient chronicling of the astonishing nature of existence. Her attentiveness to creation at every level is what makes her fiction so convincing: she sees everything, including us. “I believe that all literature is acknowledgment,” she says. “Literature says this is what sadness feels like and this is what holiness feels like, and people feel acknowledged in what they already feel.””
-- Casey Cep, ‘Marilynne Robinson’s Essential American Stories’, The New Yorker
At this hour the soul is like a yellow wing
slipping through the treetops, a little ecstatic cloud hovering over the sidewalks, calling out
to the approaching night, “Amaze me, amaze me”
Yellow Wing
Because she sees everything,
she sees the words you speak out
to the empty hall, addressed to
someone long since gone.
She sees the red crescent
moons your nails make in soft
palm skin, in the clenched fist
of an unsafe place.
Your skirting of the doorway
of the room you kept aside
for a child.
That too is beheld
by her.
She witnesses.
She keeps vigil.
She even sees in the dark.
She sees even better in the dark.
And in the slippage between night and day,
that part we once called the gloaming,
when the corners of our eyes
discern a ripple upon still air;
the passing yellow wing of something
star-flung, seeing us, dumb
with astonishment.
Poetry reading
Fateme Banishoeib is one of our collaborators. Amongst many other things, she writes poetry. In passing she mentioned that she rarely hears her own work in other voices. So, by way of thank you to her, we asked a number of the Yellow participants she had worked with, if they could help. Here is what they made of Fateme's words.....
(The poems are from Fateme’s The Whisper: Lyrical conversation with the multitudes)
Books
On Reading
A Yellow participant and collaborator, Nick Parker, was curious about how people read. So we convened a ‘Sidestream’ session about reading. Several contributions from the wide-ranging conversation made their way into the final version of the book: On Reading: Provocations, consolations and suggestions for reading more freely.
How to Think
A Yellow collaborator, Tom Chatfield, was putting the finishing touches on a new book in 2020. We invited him to share the manuscript with a select group of Yellow participants. The group provided him with feedback. Then each person recorded themselves reading a section of the book, and sent it back to Tom, so he could hear his own words in new voices. Tom’s book, How to Think: Your Essential Guide to Clear, Critical Thought, was published in June 2021.