In Discovery

Dust Study

I’ve realised I’ve been in discovery mode this month. Reading, watching, following other people’s work, especially that of other creatives. Taking things in and allowing them to incubate. A different, but no less important, kind of work.

There is research that describes this as part of the creative process. A gathering phase, sometimes followed by incubation, where material is absorbed, connections begin to form, and the work continues without taking visible shape. It is not always conscious. Often, it is only afterwards that it becomes clear something was forming.

That feels close to where I’ve been lately.

Last week I watched the Shirley Jackson biopic (2020). Elisabeth Moss plays her with a sharp, cutting intelligence. What stayed with me was the sense of a writer working from within the conditions of her life. The domestic, the interruptions, and family. Jackson drew directly from these conditions. Home, marriage, children, and place. In her writing, the familiar becomes charged and unsettled. Watching Moss play Jackson, I found myself thinking about her process. The periods of gathering, incubation, and then making. It did not all happen at once.

Years ago, on a visit to Wellington, I bought Dark Tales and never got around to reading it. This week, I took it down from the shelf and began. I listened to her short story The Lottery. Its reception was famously hostile. Letters of complaint, cancelled subscriptions. The story unsettled readers with its acceptance of violence.

Louise Bourgeois worked with a similar insistence on returning to what she lived. Memory, family, childhood. She circled this material over the years and in various forms. With both Jackson and Bourgeois, the work is not only made at the point of production. It is built over time, through attention, through what is taken in and held.

I’ve been thinking about this process in relation to my own practice. If I were to place myself within it, I would be in the gathering phase. A period of looking, feeding the work, allowing something to take shape without forcing it.

I have made work about the creative process and how connections are formed. I noticed that ideas often arrive, and connections are made at unexpected moments, while doing something mundane and repetitive, like vacuuming. I collected the dust from vacuum cleaners, suspended it in water, and photographed it. Particles moving, drifting, gathering and falling. A way of seeing something that is usually invisible.

Looking back, I can see that I was trying to understand this process. Not making as a single act, but as something that builds over time, through accumulation and attention.