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Author Bio

Dr. Laura Bissell is an Athenaeum Research Fellow and Acting Deputy Director of Research at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Laura has published her research, life writing, and poetry widely. She has written a monograph on feminist performance and matrescence (Intellect 2026) and is co-editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (Matrescence and Media).

Dr. Emily Doolittle is an Athenaeum Research Fellow and Lecturer in Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She has an ongoing interest in zoömusicology, which she explores in both her composition and through interdisciplinary collaboration with biologists. Recent works include (re)cycling I: metals, for found- object percussion instruments, and Los Bilbilikos, based on songs of and mediaeval Spanish and Ladino poetry about nightingales.

Professor Laura González’s work falls between medical humanities, psychoanalysis, performance, and Eastern thought. She is the author of Make Me Yours: How Art Seduces (Cambridge Scholars 2016) and The Hysteric (Routledge 2023). She has published chapters on the seductive qualities of a lemon squeezer, inter-semiotic translation, her maternal line, and madness.

Keywords

Ontological inquiry, creative practice, inspiration, embodied experience, collaboration

Abstract

In this creative conversation, we three artist-researchers at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland ponder inspiration in education and in our own creative practices from a range of perspectives. Each of us offers a provocation on “inspiration” from our own field of practice-research, to each other, to our colleagues, and to our community. This document presents the conversation that ensues. Drawing on our collective experiences of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, doctoral supervision across a range of performing arts and interdisciplinary fields, teaching body-centred practices such as yoga and pranayama, peer-to-peer mentoring of both academic and practice-based research, practice research methodologies, and our own arts practices (which between the three of us include music, dance, creative and non-fiction writing, theatre, visual arts, and durational performance), we discuss the ways that “inspiration,” both literal and metaphorical, permeates our work. We suggest that literal inspiration (breathing) and metaphorical inspiration (influence, insight, passion) are in fact deeply intertwined. Connection with our living, breathing, inspiring selves enables us to access artistic inspiration, while connection with artistic inspiration enables us to more fully inhabit our living, beathing, inspiring bodies.

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