Meet Kelvy Bird
By: Hannah Scharmer
Tags: Social Field, Social Art, Societal Transformation, Generative Scribing, Practitioner

Kelvy understands her drawings as parts that combine into a sequence that unfolds over time. She says: “it’s as if each drawing would be a little dandelion or some sort of flower, and together they form a garden… but it’s not just my garden, it’s an entire neighbourhood of gardens.” The visuals take on a different kind of permanence than, say, a painting would. “Most of the time the drawings are just wiped down or recycled,” Kelvy explains. “Dry erase… gone. Black board…gone.” Except that they’re not really gone: “It exists for the time it’s meant to exist, and then the digital artifact is distributed.” Like pollen, it takes on a life of its own.

As within a dialogue, the drawings represent “meaning within the social field unfolding for exactly the amount of time it’s meant to be witnessed… so that people can experience something from it and learn from it. Then the meaning enfolds again to the invisible… and the act of drawing doesn’t matter anymore, because it only matters as an artifact in service to people for their reflection and behavior.”

Scribing is “incredibly impermanent,” as long as we are considering it only as a material object. Its permanence lives as it touches “somebody’s interior condition.” If a human being is in some way affected by the scribing, then “that’s the permanence of the work… that’s the rooting of the work, and it has a much longer sense of time than just the snapshot.”

Making Room for the Negative Space

Kelvy referred to scribing as “a visual practice that helps make the spoken word seen in the moment.” Generative scribing then brings in the element of the social field, which is “the quality of relationships that the content of the session or conversation is being had within… and not only directly the relationships of those people speaking, but also of the people behind those people and the networks that they’re in.” So it is the entire array of relationships that we’re in that make up our social field. The drawing then takes into consideration “all of the energy and all of the system dynamics that are in that soil.”

That means that it’s not just “drawing one plant in the garden, sitting down and drawing that one (metaphorical) plant; rather, it’s considering all the land that you can see and feel and smell around you. Maybe you are drawing the flower that’s right in front of you, but you’re drawing it with an awareness of the entire sphere.” In short: “the practice is about including both the intangibles and the tangible domains.”

This practice requires a certain “softening to a blended reality.” This blended reality is one where “you’re not only witnessing and hearing that which is right in front of you… but also hearing the many things in between.” Growing up amongst the artworks in her parents and grandparents’ homes, Kelvy remembers being fascinated by the negative spaces of the paintings. “As the viewer, I always wondered about the relationship between the foreground and the background. Now I wonder about the same thing in conversation… when one person is speaking and one person is listening, what is foreground and what is background?” For Kelvy, the positive and negative space, or the foreground and the background, actually “exist as one.” In this way, scribing offers an opportunity to “level out the playing field.”

Listening: Using a headset for translation from Mandarin into English, during a workshop demonstration in Taipei, Taiwan.

A Heart Beating for, and With, the Next Generation

In response to the question, what is your heart beating for?, Kelvy replies: “My heart is beating — and it’s not with joy, it’s with a combination of fear and sadness probably — for younger generations.” Seeing how today’s youth is “managing to stay with current challenges, finding its voice and its course, and choosing life, gives me a lot of hope.” And, for Kelvy, “everything I’m doing is to just, in some small way, help with preparedness for the transition we need as a species to survive.”

And so it is not “a beating heart of excitement…but that’s what gives me the courage and the will to basically do everything I’m doing.”

Video of the interview: