INTRODUCING

LUKE JAANISTE

IDEA WHISPERER

 

for those at the formative stages

of a creative life project…

 

who need help with clarity and direction

because things are cloudy, complex or chaotic…

Hi, I’m Luke. An artist, musician and philosopher by night, and ‘ideas whisperer’ by day.

My mad skills of fully open listening, hyper patterning recognising and punchy summarising — and my close collaborative contact with hundreds of artists, researchers and social entrepreneurs over the last decade of lecturing, tutoring and creating — means I’ve become a specialist at working with people in the formatives phases of their projects and ideas, whatever their walk of life.

I excel at listening to the complexities of someone’s creative life project, and then developing useful patterns/understandings to make real, practical progress. I’m also great at organising massive clusters of texts or creative outputs, and structure, editing and laying out long-form documents.

I work fast. We have fun. You feel refreshed and clearer (check those testimonials).

ASSISTING YOU WITH

  • Creative process and next steps (when things feel stuck or unclear)
  • Big ideas and structure (when your hunches need to take shape)
  • Archival organisation (when you have stuff that needs sorting)
  • Writing/story (when you need better words, and structure/layout)
  • Visual design (when you need better visuals, for info and promo)

ACROSS A RANGE OF CONTEXTS

  • research activities (proposals, reports, creative practice methods)
  • creative practice (fixing blockages, defining next steps, planning)
  • stories (short and long biographies, artist statements, press kits, promotional texts)
  • long-form documents (books, reports, essays, poetry anthologies)
  • work spaces (redesigning creative studios, workflows, layouts)

THE FORMATIVE PHASES + WHERE I HELP

 

I help with the most fertile and thus most nebulous and ambiguous phase of projects and ideas — the formative phases where complexity and cloudiness are part of the natural life cycle of ideation and creation.

I help writers, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, leaders and anyone who is seeking to transform hunches into directions and designs, to remould scattered archives and half-ideas into meaningful patterns, and to pass through creative process blocks into achievable next steps.

My goal and my delight is to help you make progress in tangible ways, much faster and clearer than can be achieved by oneself.

 

 

BEGINNING TO WORK TOGETHER

 

We usually begin with a 2-3hr session in a very friendly, open and refreshing conversation, leading to things feeling clearer and lighter afterwards.

I seek to understand your project and complexities with as much detail as you do, and then apply my pattern-building and story-telling capacities to it.

We chat in-depth and in-breadth about all relevant ideas, processes, feelings and issues relevant to your project — what are you hoping for? what are you exploring? what is clear and what is confusing? I check in with your feelings and bodily senses as much as thoughts and facts.

I jot all this down, and build a visual map of core factors. Much can be achieved in this first session. Patterns emerge and we begin to plot out next steps.

To sum up, you are out-sourcing your complexities to my intuition. My intuition is playing with connections it finds in the living intricacies of your project/idea. This can work because I love playing with patterns, understand creative process intimately and extensively, and come to your stuff afresh.

METHODS

 

The goal is to rapidly immerse myself in the depth and breadth of your idea/project, using a range of methods, depending on what’s needed:

  • conversation and questions (in-person or video-chat)
  • diagramming and pattern formation (on white board / paper / digitally)
  • story-boarding and structuring (shaping big ideas and their logical flow)
  • auditing of creative process (physical set up, work flow, habits)
  • intervention in creative blockages (experiments to change what is stuck)

I can also help with practical tasks related to:

  • archiving (collating and ordering research materials and creative outputs)
  • writing (structural editing, layout of long-form document)
  • visual design (visual imagery, informational diagrams)

 

TESTIMONIALS

Luke’s skill at getting alongside and inside my thinking process has been remarkable — helping me gather together all the tendrils of several decades of creative life, distilling the core things I wish to explore, and funnelling this into a research proposal.

He is a deep listener and thinking companion as well as a provocateur, and takes seriously both the large and small instances which led me to my hunch/research. Many times he proposes just the right next step… to help bring useful shapes up out of murkiness, into language and onto the page.

What Luke does feels muscular, or skeletal… like he is building a handmade and strategic scaffold with me, that I can go hang my creative life on… generating forward movement. It’s exciting!

Lynette Lancini

musician, communal facilitator, Director, Wholebody Creative Change

Luke has a unique ability to ask questions that guide your thinking processes about a particular subject towards personal clarity. You might think of it as a kind of psychotherapy for your research or artistic explorations.

What makes Luke particularly effective at this is his ability to remain separate, unbiased, non-judgemental, patient, and to keep the focus very much on you and your own work…

It’s about helping you to get beyond the accumulated muddle of ideas that tend to be accrued over time, to question assumptions, and to gain some insight into what is actually important rather than simply baggage. It’s all a bit Zen, and worth it if you are feeling confused about your direction.

Chris Healey

music composer, doctoral researcher, University of Queensland

Working with Luke is so enjoyable. He is a person of great intellect matched with gentle openness and the ability to listen deeply without judgement. This creates a safe space of dialogue for me to offer up my many thoughts, and half-thoughts, around my research interests and emerging creative practice.

Luke has a real gift of sifting through my ideas, sensing connections and patterns, and communicating them back quickly in ways that feel authentic and accurate, expressed in words I struggle to come up with on my own.

My writing has improved markedly since working together, which has translated into real world success in exhibition and artist residency applications.

The process has been so insightful, and Luke’s enthusiasm for discussing ideas is encouraging and highly motivating.

Michelle Vine

artist, photographer, Director, Michelle Vine Studio

CONTACT

Luke Jaaniste

0405 739 240

ideas.whispering@gmail.com

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