What am I Doing?

I recently came across a TikTok video made by Prof Stephen | Art + Business (@profstephenb) about how to craft an artist’s story. He recommended locating three things: the spark that led to creating art, the drive that keeps the art going, and the message that the art seeks to share with an audience.

When I first started making art, I decided to only do work that seemed interesting and fun to me. If the work stopped feeling that way, I changed direction until it became interesting and creative-feeling again. I didn’t realize until I tried Prof Stephen’s exercises that the way I choose to work fits perfectly into his three steps. Here’s what I came up with:

Spark: Curiosity.

For me, that means an intellectual, physical, experiential, artistic, and spiritual curiosity about most things.

Drive: The play of the debris curator.

The kind that gathers grief, absurdity, rupture, tenderness, bureaucratic nonsense, women with missing histories, dream poisoning, and other things that cannot be easily explained.

Message: Everything is already here.

A kaleidoscope already contains everything it’s going to contain. The pieces move. Patterns emerge and we name them. The pieces move again.