The Transferability of Creativity
Your background is in architecture. How does your experience of creating something like No. 105 differ from the experience of creating an architectural work? And what, if anything, might that reveal about creativity?
That’s a quite interesting question. Most of my creative work (be it poetry, architecture, or art) follow a pretty similar pattern, so perhaps what could be drawn from that is the fact that one’s individual creative process has the ability to the transferred quite easily across disciplines — remaining pretty much the same while doing so. If I break this process down, perhaps it would look something like: sensation, experimentation, and judgment.
Sensation is the first step in this process, and it’s where the work is fundamentally rooted. This sensation is not the same as a basic emotion (such as sadness, anger, awe, distress, happiness, and the like) but more akin to a more general sense of being in a certain space at a specific time (something like phenomenology, in philosophical terms).
The initial sensation is then followed by a first attempt at manifesting it in the material world (in words, in space, on a canvas, or with something else — depending on the chosen media). Because the sensation itself is so ambiguous, it is almost always impossible to tackle it head — on — rather, it must be reached almost accidentally through continuous trial and error and mistake. In other words, open — ended experimentation.
In poetry, this means throwing words onto a page — whatever comes to mind and feels true. In architecture, this means assembling things in unpredictable ways. In art, this means placing various material onto a canvas in a seemingly arbitrary manner.
This step is not really done haphazardly (because I do have some very general sense of where I would like to go and not, as well as some previous experience with that works and what does not work) but it is done with a large degree of chance, mistake, and being forced to accept the unexpected. In other words — it is done primarily without a plan (to avoid restriction) and without judgment (to avoid doubt).
Judgment follows later, and is the third step of the process. I act before I judge (evident not only in my work, but my approach to life events at large) and it is in this stage that I slowly begin to open my eyes, evaluate what I have done, and judge whether or not it is acting in accordance to what feels true.
At this stage the initial sensation may have altered slightly or completely disintegrated — both of which are completely fine. My works aren’t static, and if I try to replicate a sensation that no longer exist within me, I no longer speak the truth. The finished work may thus exhibit a completely novel sensation which has emerged out of the process of creation — which, in turn (and if I am lucky) may inspire the next work.
To me, art is not a reflection of an object or an event, nor is it in and of itself an object. Rather, it is an open — ended process and a reflection of one’s approach to life itself.
I approach art just the way that I approach life — emotional, open — ended, and tainted by experiment, mistake, failure, and a relentless stubbornness. Perhaps the people who enjoy my work also recognise something of their own lives within them.
