Risk – from the Italian risicare, ‘to dare’ – carries both danger and possibility, offering transformative rewards when one embraces uncertainty (Bernstein, 1996). In academic settings, risk means resisting prioritising conventions of measurable outcomes, linear processes, and a narrow, product-focused definition of creativity as novel and useful (Glăveanu, 2013; Runco & Jaeger, 2012). By contrast, embracing embodied, phenomenological processes without predetermined outcomes reframes creative risk as a generative space for deeper engagement, insight, and transformation. Fractals of Nature (Fractals), a non-traditional research output (NTRO), exemplifies this approach through multisensory encounters deliberately designed to unsettle habitual perception and invite participants and researchers to defer immediate judgement.
Deferring Judgement: Entering the Unknown
Deferring judgement involves consciously resisting immediate evaluation to allow intuitive, unexpected insights to emerge (Larocca, 2019, 2023). Complementing this, Bateson’s (2017) warm data approach encourages relational, contextual meaning-making, while Glăveanu’s (2020) possibilities framework positions creativity as an ongoing dialogue between imagination and discovery. Both approaches embrace uncertainty and vulnerability as essential catalysts for creative transformation, underpinning the risks taken in Fractals. Held on 21 September 2023 at Sydney’s National Art School (NAS), an institution historically known for boundary-pushing creativity, Fractals aligned closely with the institution’s commitment to experimental, inclusive artistic practice. The risk lay in staging an experience that defied participants’ expectations, intentionally leading them into ambiguous, sensory-rich encounters where outcomes were uncertain and transformation unpredictable.
Framing the Inquiry
The design of Fractals was guided by questions focusing explicitly on creative risk through embodied experience:
- How does deferring judgement foster creative risk through embodied experiences?
- What imaginative transformations occur when participants navigate uncertainty?
- How can intuitive, somatic ways of knowing unlock new possibilities?
Embodied Risk in Practice: The Fractals Experience
Each component of Fractals – scent, touch, and taste – was carefully constructed to create intentional ambiguity and invite participants into an unknown, sensory-rich space:
Scent Room: Participants were first led into a softly lit room infused with a bespoke fragrance, co-created with a professional perfumer. The scent layered grounding notes of frankincense and vetiver with bright citrus tones, designed to settle the body before gently opening it to imaginative possibility. Without instruction, participants were invited to respond using watercolours – an intentionally fluid, unpredictable medium that mirrored the uncertainty of the experience. Participants translated scent into colour, form, and language revealing deep emotional and sensory connections. Responses such as ‘the scent brings me home to a deeper sense of self!’ and ‘better than a warm hug on a frosty winter morn’ illustrate how open-ended, embodied engagement enabled intuitive meaning-making and reconnection to memory, place, and self.
Translating scent into image bypassed rational interpretation, allowing participants to externalise inner states and attune to felt shifts, however subtle.
Touch Room: Participants entered a softly lit space scented with beeswax and filled with the quiet hum of storytelling. While listening to an Indigenous folk yarn about the honeybee – chosen for its symbolism of interdependence and environmental care – they were invited to shape warm beeswax with their hands. They wrote personal hopes onto seeded paper and encased them inside the wax. This symbolic act – planting a future hope inside a protective, natural material – embodied the risk of vulnerability: offering intentions to an uncertain future, without assurance of outcome. The use of seeded paper reinforced the theme of emergence; growth could not be guaranteed, only hoped for. This multi-sensory, participatory ritual encouraged a deeper engagement with uncertainty and connection, both to self and collective intention.
Participants inscribed their personal hopes – ranging from ecological reverence to collective healing – symbolising the act of planting intentions in uncertain soil. These offerings emerged through tactile engagement, storytelling, and a willingness to share vulnerability in communal space.
Taste Room: Guided through a silent honey tasting, participants explored flavour as a sensory portal to memory and meaning. Without prompts or evaluative criteria, they translated their experiences into spontaneous odes – a creative risk that required vulnerability and trust in their embodied response. These poetic fragments revealed deep reconnections to nature and newly felt commitments to ecological care.
These reflections demonstrate how sensory immersion catalysed heartfelt expression and reverence for the bee as a symbol of ecological interdependence, creativity, and care.
This creative explosion – artworks, poetic reflections, communal installations – demonstrates how risk yields reward. By stepping into uncertainty, participants discovered new capacities for expression and connection. The sensory disorientation, rather than creating barriers, became a gateway to previously inaccessible insights.
Ethical Relationality through Embodied Uncertainty
Fractals revealed how ethical relationality naturally arises through embodied risk-taking. As participants navigated uncertainty together, attentiveness extended beyond personal experience to encompass communal relationships and the broader more-than-human world. This collective, evolving experience fostered mutual responsibility and care – an ethical dimension intrinsically connected to the embodied risk.
The Rewards of Risk
Creative risk invites a deliberate movement into the unknown, where outcomes are not guaranteed, and control is surrendered. In Fractals, the risk was an embodied, multisensory engagement – sensing, making, and meaning unfolding without a script. Deferring judgement created space for intuitive insight, ethical connection, and shared imagination. This kind of inquiry values ambiguity, relational knowledge, and process over product – qualities often marginalised by academic systems focused on measurable outputs and fixed results. Fractals made visible the power of process: the risk of not knowing became the condition for transformation. In this way, risk is its catalyst and its gift.
References
Bateson, N. (2017). Warm data: Contextual research and the evolution of science. International Bateson Institute, Stockholm, 12, 35–40.
Bernstein, P. L. (1996). Against the gods: The remarkable story of risk. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Glăveanu, V. P. (2013). Rewriting the language of creativity: The Five A’s framework. Review of General Psychology, 17(1), 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029528
Glăveanu, V. P. (2020). The possible: A sociocultural theory. Oxford University Press.
Larocca, P. (2019). Connecting: Harnessing your emotions to enhance your creativity. BIS Publishers.
Larocca, P. (2023). The parable proxy of possibilities. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the possible. Springer Nature.
Runco, M. A., & Jaeger, G. J. (2012). The standard definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 24(1), 92–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2012.650092
Paulina Larocca is a researcher, author, and creative practitioner specialising in transdisciplinary innovation, embodied storytelling, and deferring judgement in creative processes. She has completed her PhD at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) pending formal conferral and teaches at the Transdisciplinary (TD School), where she works at the intersection of creativity, complexity, and more-than-human research.
Main image: Participant Hopes from the Touch Room