cultivating humaness poetic texts

reshaping perceptions of value and the possibilities of art in care.

The Poetics of Table Laying

The Social Context: A Life Reconfigured by Vascular Dementia.

Vascular dementia, caused by interruptions in the brain’s blood supply, often leaves individuals grappling with profound physical and cognitive challenges. Weakness on one side of the body, difficulties with speech, and struggles with memory or planning weave a fabric of disorientation and loss. Executive function slows, and with it, the ability to perform even the simplest daily rituals—like laying a family table.

In one poignant instance, a woman faced the unbearable distress of being unable to arrange the dinner table for her family. Her anguish reverberated through her loved ones, filling the room with a silent grief that everyone felt but no one could articulate. This small, seemingly mundane task had become a site of despair and disconnection.

The Creative Process: Forgetting as Liberation

In that moment, I saw an opening—not for perfection or restoration but for reconfiguration. Forgetting, I realized, can be a portal to something profoundly human: the ability to let go of fixed ideas and social conditioning.

Here, the insights of Proust seemed to echo: habit and convention immobilize us, chaining us to rituals that once served but now constrain. Dementia, with its vivid fragments of memory and disjointed narratives, disrupts this, forcing us to reimagine the present as something fluid, contradictory, and alive.

To forget, Proust argued, is to search for a deeper sense of existence—one that revitalizes and reorients us. Can we, like him, find beauty in fragments, in scenes and sensations that arrive without warning and refuse coherence?

A Poetics of the Table: Wabi-Sabi and the Beauty of Entropy

The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi encourages an appreciation of impermanence, imperfection, and entropy. It invites us to see the degradation of form not as loss, but as an intimate bond between the object and its beholder. In this framework, the table is no longer a stage for convention but a site of improvisation—

a canvas for spontaneous formations.

Improvisation, after all, is the art of reacting to the moment, inventing new patterns, and reshaping the status quo. To lay a table “incorrectly” is not a failure but an act of redefinition: a playful rebellion against the tyranny of social conditioning.

The Outcome: Transformance

The table became Hella’s reclamation, her poetic resistance. By laying it her own way—forks scattered, knives misplaced, plates unaligned—she undid the suffocating ritual of “proper” table-setting. What emerged was not disorder but a new order: one that celebrated compassion, patience, and spontaneity.

Her family, at my suggestion, embraced the scene. They picked up their knives and forks from wherever they lay, transforming the moment into a playful ritual. This daily act, once a source of anguish, became an opportunity for connection, creativity, and renewal. The ordinary was elevated; the habitual reconsidered.

A Salvage Operation: Finding Beauty in the Everyday

Like salvaging a shipwreck, this process was about rescuing meaning from distress. Hella’s table-laying became a metaphor for her life: a spontaneous moment of inventiveness arising from loss. By allowing her to redefine the ritual on her own terms, we created space for dignity, joy, and the poetry of imperfection.

In this act, we were reminded of the power of art—not as something confined to galleries but as a practice embedded in daily life. Art, here, was a gesture: an invitation to sit, to eat, to gather, and to make peace with the imperfect beauty of the present moment.

Paper Sculptures

I was a ‘primary carer’ for someone who spent a lot of days line-writing over many years. Once he had filled up the A4 sheet he was working on it would be torn off the pad, screwed up and thrown in the bin. Sometimes he would do this all day long and he had done this for years. I saw beauty and meditation in what he was doing and felt it was time for his work to be valued.

So, with his permission, I began to take these screwed up pieces of paper out of the bin and another resident volunteered to paint over them. I then asked the line-writer if I could cut them up and make sculptures with them, he was very happy to watch me and he began to join in. We made a series of paper sculptures with them, eventually involving other members of staff with this activity until we had enough pieces to frame and exhibit them on a wall in his room. He was so delighted.

This process brought people together and created such a lovely calm atmosphere, reducing anxiety whilst helping me to build a bond and a lovely relationship.

These were not just paper sculptures; they had a long history behind them with so much meaning and personal process. Anyone can do paper sculptures, but when they have been made from something in this way it makes them very special and personal.

I like to think these sculptures are an illustration of how lives can entwine, sometimes in fragile and unusual ways. And a way of showing how easy the overlooked and undervalued can be discarded, yet become a major part of someones life.

Paper Sculptures, as Nicolas Bourriaud might describe, embody a relational aesthetic, transforming an ephemeral, undervalued act into a profound social and creative experience. Initially, the line-writing—repetitive and meditative—was dismissed as insignificant, its physical traces discarded. However, through intervention and collaboration, these overlooked gestures became the foundation of a communal artistic process.

By retrieving the discarded papers and involving another resident in painting them, the act of creation expanded beyond the individual. The original writer, once an isolated figure in his routine, became an active participant in reimagining his work. The transformation culminated in paper sculptures exhibited in his personal space, reframing these objects as symbols of shared histories and mutual recognition.

These sculptures illustrate how art materializes relational dynamics, embodying the intertwining of lives and the transformation of discarded acts into cherished expressions. The process reduced anxiety, fostered calm, and built bonds, exemplifying art’s potential to recontextualize the undervalued. Bourriaud’s lens would highlight this as a micro-utopia: an ephemeral yet significant social structure where lives and creativity intersect, reshaping perceptions of value and the possibilities of art in care.