In Discovery

Dust Study

I’ve been in discovery mode this month. Reading, watching, following other people’s work, especially that of other creatives. 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’s not always conscious. Often, it’s only afterwards that it becomes clear something was forming.

Last week I watched the Shirley Jackson biopic (2020). What stayed with me was the sense of a writer working from within the conditions of her life. Jackson drew from the domestic, her family, and her interactions with the wider community. In her writing, the familiar becomes charged and unsettled. Watching Elisabeth Moss play Jackson, I found myself thinking about the creative process. The periods of gathering, incubation, and then making.

Years ago, on a visit to Wellington, I bought Jackson’s Dark Tales and never got around to reading it. This week, I took the book down from the shelf and began. I also listened to her short story The Lottery. Its reception was famously hostile. When the story was published in The New Yorker there were letters of complaint, and cancelled subscriptions. The story unsettled readers with its acceptance of violence.

Louise Bourgeois returned to memory, family, and childhood. She circled this material throughout her practice, and in various forms. With Jackson and Bourgeois, the work is built over time, through attention, and 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 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 make sense of this process. Not making as a single act, but as something that builds over time, through accumulation and attention.