On January 21st we were once again upstairs at The Devereux in London digging deep into creativity.

First up, we had the very engaging musician and writer Paul Taylor talking with us about his creative process and how he combines his work across multiple fields to create his core project, Trombone Poetry, and the production of a diverse collection of books of poems and photographs. A key element in Paul’s process is defining a set of rules to frame the way he works and, influenced by OuLiPo, the Workshop of Potential Literature founded in Paris in 1960, Paul showed how he’s drawn inspiration from this group’s continued work in rules-based creativity and used it to invent his own set of constraints to playfully engage with everything from art and music to architecture, urbanism & media while touching upon many other themes along the way.

Following Paul, Fatima Maria Felisberti talked about creativity from a different direction as she engaged us in an exploration of the brain and the different ways it processes sensory input. As a neuroscientist and artist, Fatima Maria’s research investigates how perception, emotion, and imagination shape our experience with art and nature. She introduced some of the remarkable ways our brain interacts with the world - not just passively observing, but actively shaping what we see and how we imagine. With some hands-on demonstrations in optical illusions and colour adaptation she uncovered how perception bends reality and revealed the delicate dance between the two and how it deepens our connection to the world around us—and to ourselves.