Living Inside Imagination

On nesting, making, and staying oriented when nothing else holds

I’ve made work with the words burn it down in it, and that phrase still surfaces when I take in how things feel right now. Lately, though, my body isn’t reaching for destruction. It’s reaching for shelter, structure, and something alive to tend. I’ve spent time wrestling with what I have to offer in moments like this, how to be of use without performance or prescription. What I keep returning to is the act of making itself. When systems feel unstable and meaning thins out, creation becomes my orientation. The work becomes the structure, and what is being built is also what holds the builder. Sharing this feels like the most honest contribution I can make, as an act of presence. Even here, especially here, Eros persists.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been creating art with pleasure, inhabiting it rather than approaching it as something external to myself. I’ve been noticing though, that writing hasn’t always carried the same ease I feel in the studio. That difference has felt like something to note.

I entered imagination before I entered judgment. I started drawing as a toddler, and in a household where I was often unsupervised, making became something that belonged entirely to me. I didn’t know there was a right way or a wrong way. I didn’t know there was an audience. Imagination arrived as a place rather than an activity. It moved first and I followed.

Because of that, a certain kind of authority arrived early. I learned to trust a vision and act on it before I ever felt the need to explain it. That way of working stayed with me throughout my life and career. I didn’t decode visions before moving toward them, rather, I learned by moving.

When I’m in the studio, judgment rarely enters the room. When a vision appears and I begin to create, I’m not asking what the work will mean or how it will be received. I pay attention to what the space needs. I follow scale, color, material, and rhythm. I don’t narrate or manage the process. It strikes me now, it’s no wonder I identify most strongly with that space. I let the work happen by staying close and getting out of the way.

Writing has a different history in my body. It arrived intermittently since high school, more often than not under observation. Language learned that way carries residue. I feel it when I write… a subtle vigilance and reflex to explain. Those voices aren’t mine. It’s clear to me that part of my work now is teaching my writing to remember what my imagination already knows. I can feel the shift happening. The language is becoming more direct, less mediated, and more alive. I’m enjoying it more.

I’m working quietly now, building a new installation in the studio and letting the days arrange themselves around the work. It’s teaching me about nesting, rhythm, and the intelligence that appears when nothing is being performed.

Space has always met me when people could not. Walls, rooms, light, arrangement, scale. What many would call decoration has always registered to me as intelligence. Nesting is a way of listening and transforming space is a form of orientation. Space itself becomes eros.

For paid subscribers, I’m sharing images from the installation I’m building now, along with a closer look at how this process is unfolding inside the studio.