Art makes us Human

Another day, another announcement of mass redundancies in university arts and humanities in the UK.

It’s prompted me to once again think about the value we place on creativity and critical thinking, especially as so much of our lives is increasingly supported by AI. I am excited by the possibilities of handing over more of the mundane aspects of working life (yes, I want AI to do my taxes and index my books for me). But I know in my bones that AI will never be able to replace the resonance of human creativity.

And we shouldn’t want it to.

Because making, creating, dancing, painting, singing, sculpting, rhyming, writing - these are not superfluous activities; they are crucial to a thriving culture.

They are the very definition of what makes us human. It is what sets us apart and, as I keep telling my children, the ability to daydream is what will set them apart from their peers.

The arts are not a frivolity or an addendum to something else. They are not merely escapism from ‘the real world’. Creative expression is a fundamental part of the human condition. An key element in our survival.

We engage creatively to come back to ourselves. It is time that can offer rest, renewal, an exploration of an unfamiliar emotional experience, or the chance to imagine other worlds and possibilities.

The arts and humanities form the basis for human connection and empathy. They complement the discoveries of STEM subjects, allowing us to ponder our place in the world and the very nature of our world itself.

This is why we have sculptural forms that date back tens of thousands of years, like these terracotta figurines from the Indus Valley.

I like to imagine the act of their creation. Of the hands that moulded the soft clay, fingers shaping the bodies and curves, gently pressing features onto the faces perhaps thinking of a face of a loved on.

I wonder if working with clay connected the maker to the earth, connected them to a fundamental part of their lives. Lives which these small figurines enabled them to reflect back upon, when they were placed in the home or passed from hand to hand, or thrown into a fire.

Figure of a mother; fragmentary terracotta figure of a possibly pregnant woman; figure of a females. Made of terracotta. Indus Valley, 2500BCE-2000BCE, British Museum.

Lived experiences and ideas about our worlds have been given form ever since humans started taking lamps and pigment deep into caves.

The earliest known cave painting is in Indonesia and dates from around 45,000 years ago. It depicts a wild pig and it appears that our Palaeolithic ancestors paid much more attention to capturing the details of animals than they did to painting humanoid figures. If they wanted to leave their own ‘portrait’, they preferred to record their trace by leaving stencilled handprints.

But roughly ten thousand years after that wild pig, the first known ‘Venus’ statues began to be created. These are voluptuous, faceless women made from clay that gave shape to human experience. In the late 1980s, researchers discovered why so many of these statuettes were found in fragments; the clay had been treated so that when the figures were thrown into a fire they popped and exploded. Was this a form of ritual? Entertainment? Catharsis?

Either way, from this point onwards, figures of maternal women and/or goddesses proliferated. 

I know that when I struggled with new motherhood - with the process of matrescence - it was engaging with art that helped make me feel less isolated, more connected, and ultimately stronger and more capable in myself.

I began obsessively searching for historical fragments of mothering lives – because I felt as if I was failing and needed something to tether myself to. I began to write because that let me externalise everything that was roiling in my head and my gut.

I felt small and inconsequential in the world. It was art, the humanities and creativity and that offered me solace, providing pathways to reconnect to myself.

Louise Bourgeois said that: “an artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing”.

In those early days of transition, I returned to her work again and again, finding poignant humour in her work. Red pregnant bodies bleed across the white page with astronaut babies floating within them. Globular multi-breasted figures captured the strange, ever-changing landscape of a birthing body.

In all of this, my perception of myself and my reality shifted. I felt myself being stitched into a larger history, a vast and elaborate tapestry.

Engagement with visual art, history, and writing wasn’t simply a luxury - it was essential. It galvanised my belief that the arts and humanities are vital in facing the challenges of living in a polycrisis.

That not everyone has the chance to engage or that they feel as if the arts are not for them is a symptom of a culture where priorities have gone deeply wrong.

Creativity is not a rejection of the real, but instead opens spaces for new perceptions of our reality.

A humanity that does not make space for making art is a humanity that is diverting off course.