Dear artist in the position of beginner, which is different from every other position in the creative life,

Dear calligrapher who has chosen something unfamiliar, for reasons that may have been clear at the time or more instinctive than articulable,

Dear painter who is trying ceramics and whose hands have knowledge of how to attend to a surface without the particular knowledge of what this surface requires,

Dear filmmaker who is trying embroidery, working with a needle and thread in a medium your hands have no history with, noticing what the unfamiliarity produces,

Dear artist who has been making in the same medium for a long time and who is now, by intention or by necessity, in the position of doing something the hands have yet to learn,

Dear ceramicist who is trying dance, or a dancer who is trying printmaking, or someone whose primary medium has become less available and who is meeting a new material for the first time,

Dear human who has chosen the risk of the unfamiliar and who is in the middle of what that costs and what it opens,

This is for you.

The position of beginner in a new creative medium is often felt or described in terms of what it lacks: the skill, the fluency, the developed aesthetic judgment, the physical knowledge that comes from time and repetition. What it tends to carry, though, is a quality of attention that skilled practice has long since organized away, a relationship with the material that is unmediated by habit, and a form of unknowing that exists only at the beginning and that accumulated expertise tends to close off.

The new creative medium meets you without expectation. It has no knowledge of your previous work, your established aesthetic, the choices you have made enough times that they have become automatic. It encounters you fresh. And the freshness runs in both directions.

There is a quality of attention that beginner’s mind in a medium requires that skilled practice tends to organize away. The expert practitioner has learned to manage many of the medium’s demands automatically, which is what expertise produces and which is why it is useful. The automaticity also means that the medium’s qualities stop being noticed as qualities and become simply what making is. The beginner notices everything because nothing can yet be taken for granted. The material’s resistance, its behavior, its preferences, its surprises: these are events rather than background.

That quality of attention to the properties of a material is, as it turns out, what the Sensory Recall works to recapture for materials you know well. The beginner has it for free, because the material’s behavior cannot yet be predicted and every behavior deserves noticing. This is a creative resource that exists only at the beginning and that the long relationship tends to move away from.

Also particular to the beginner’s position is freedom from the weight of your own established aesthetic in this medium. The work you make in an unfamiliar new creative medium arrives without the expectation of what your work in your known medium looks like. The comparisons that follow you in your primary practice, from outside and from inside, are less immediately active when you are working in a medium where no one, including you, has an established expectation of what you should do. This can be liberating, alongside and through the difficulty and frustration that beginner’s work in any medium tends to involve.

And there is something to say about what the beginner’s body already knows when it meets an unfamiliar material. The somatic knowledge built in every medium worked in across the creative life, including childhood mediums and brief experiments and materials touched once and set down, is in the body. The new creative medium arrives into a body that already has a history with materials, a developed sensitivity to physical engagement with things made for making. The beginner’s mind is more than empty. It is meeting something new with everything the body has accumulated from everything it has touched.

That accumulated physical intelligence informs the encounter with the new material even when you cannot consciously direct it. The hands know things about how to hold and move and apply that the mind has yet to learn to articulate in the terms of this medium. Sometimes the first thing made in a new creative medium is strange and interesting in ways that the deliberate, skilled work in the known medium has rarely been, because the accumulated somatic knowledge is operating without the filter of conscious aesthetic control.

What if you approached the experiment with the unfamiliar material as an encounter rather than as a test? What if the unknowing, the beginner’s attention, the freshness of the meeting, were the point rather than the obstacle to the point?

The new creative medium has no expectation of you. Meet it from everything you have accumulated. See what happens when your full creative history encounters something that has no idea what you are capable of.

Love,

Kathryn

Gordon Parks bought his first camera at a pawnshop in 1938. He was twenty-five, living in Chicago, working as a waiter and a piano player. He had no formal training. He had seen a photo essay on migrant workers during a break at work and felt the force of what a photograph could do.

Within three years he had his first major exhibition and the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship. Within ten he was the first Black staff photographer at Life magazine.

He was about to spend the next sixty years building one of the most deliberately diversified creative careers in American cultural history, by necessity.

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There is likely a reason you reach for a particular material when the world becomes difficult. The nervous system is doing functional, physiological work, and the research supports what the body already seems to know.

The relationship between sensory experience and nervous system regulation is well-documented and directly relevant to creative practice, in ways that are almost entirely absent from mainstream creative discourse. Understanding it changes what material choice means, and why certain mediums become important to certain artists in ways that have little to do with aesthetic preference alone.

This piece looks at four places the research clarifies the relationship, and closes with three artists whose changed circumstances made that relationship most visible.

What the Art Materials and Nervous System Research Shows

Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory describes the nervous system’s movement among three primary states: the ventral vagal state (safe, connected, regulated), the sympathetic state (mobilized, fight-or-flight), and the dorsal vagal state (shutdown, immobilization, collapse). Creative work, in most of its forms, requires something close to the ventral vagal state: a felt sense of safety sufficient to allow real exploration, openness to what emerges, the capacity to stay present with uncertainty.

The pathway to the ventral vagal state is rarely purely cognitive or volitional. Physical and sensory input plays a significant role in shifting the nervous system among states. Kinds of engagement that include repetitive movement, rhythmic action, focused sensory attention, and moderate physical challenge without threat have been documented to support movement toward the ventral vagal state. This is why certain creative materials and practices function as regulation tools for the nervous system rather than only as expressive vehicles. The art materials and nervous system relationship means the material is doing physiological work that the content of the work neither replaces nor replicates.

The philosopher John Dewey, in Art as Experience, argued that the making itself is a continuous correspondence between the artist and the material as it resists and responds. The material is never passive. For the polyvagal-informed artist, Dewey’s point extends: the material is never neutral either. Its sensory qualities reach the nervous system through the hands, the eyes, the ears, the nose. The correspondence Dewey described is always, also, a physiological exchange. Every material has a regulatory profile, named or unnamed.

What Cross-Body Engagement Offers

Some creative materials and practices produce what researchers describe as bilateral or cross-body engagement: activities that require coordinated use of both sides of the body, crossing the body’s midline, with documented neurological effects. Fiber arts, particularly crochet and knitting, are widely studied examples: the coordinated bilateral hand movement, combined with the rhythmic and repetitive nature of the work, produces effects that are distinct from what unilateral or non-repetitive making generates.

The neurological effects of cross-body creative engagement include bilateral stimulation of brain hemispheres, activation of the body’s regulatory systems, reduction in cortisol associated with the arousal response, and support for heart rate variability patterns associated with regulated nervous system states. These effects are measurable and replicable. They are also independent of the quality or meaning of what gets made: the body receives the regulatory benefit of the bilateral repetitive movement whether the work being made is significant or otherwise.

This is the same mechanism the polyvagal research names, now made visible in one material family. Bessel van der Kolk’s work on trauma and the body, particularly The Body Keeps the Score, documents the same bilateral principle at work in therapeutic contexts: coordinated cross-midline engagement supports the nervous system’s capacity for integration in ways purely cognitive interventions rarely reach. What happens in the fiber artist’s hands during a difficult week is, at the physiological level, adjacent to what happens in therapeutic bilateral stimulation protocols. Artists with anxiety or hypervigilance often describe certain bilateral creative practices as the only engagement that reliably quiets the internal noise. The benefit is physiological, and it arrives through the sensory and motor engagement the material provides, regardless of what is produced.

What the Body Remembers Across All the Materials It Has Touched

The somatic memory of creative materials, what each medium has felt like under the hands across the full arc of a creative life, persists long after any given practice has ended. Peter Levine’s research on somatic experiencing, the body’s capacity to hold and process experience through physical sensation rather than through narrative, suggests that the body’s relationship with materials it has worked with is stored as felt sense rather than as explicit memory. You may be unable to describe in precise terms what working with a childhood material felt like, and the body holds that information and can access it.

This is why returning to a childhood material during a period of health difficulty often produces an effect that seems disproportionate to the activity: the body is accessing a felt sense of safety and creative capacity from a time before the health challenge existed, through the sensory properties of the material rather than through any cognitive intention. The material is the key. The body holds the door.

Eugene Gendlin, whose work on focusing explored the body’s capacity to carry information that arrives in language only after the body has had time with it, described this carrying as an ongoing somatic process. The body holds. It remembers through sensation. When the hand meets a material it has known before, the meeting surfaces what the body has been keeping. Sensory creative regulation, in this light, includes the regulation available through reunion with material the body has already learned how to be with.

What Dance Illuminates About Embodied Medium and Mental Health

Dance as a medium has a documented relationship with mental health that illuminates what any embodied creative practice offers at the physiological level. Dance/movement therapy research has found consistent effects on depression, anxiety, and trauma responses that are attributed to the qualities of embodied movement: the simultaneous engagement of physical, emotional, and cognitive systems; the experience of self-efficacy through physical action; the regulation of nervous system states through rhythmic movement; and the processing of experience through kinesthetic rather than verbal channels.

What dance demonstrates, for the wider question of art materials and nervous system function, is that the embodied quality of making is doing physiological work that cognitive or verbal creative engagement neither touches nor replaces. The body moving through space, the hands working with resistant material, the breath moving in coordination with physical effort: these are more than means to a creative end. They are part of what the making is providing, at a level that precedes and shapes the quality of creative engagement available.

Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy builds on the same recognition from a therapeutic angle. The body is an organ of knowing. Movement, posture, breath, and sensation are all places the nervous system speaks, and they all participate in the state from which any cognitive or creative work becomes possible. Dance, in her frame, is one of the clearest illustrations of what every embodied art is also doing, at some level, through the sensory vocabulary each material offers.

What Matisse, Chuck Close, and Others Demonstrate

Henri Matisse’s cut-paper works of the 1940s were developed after severe illness made painting physically impossible. Working with pre-painted sheets of paper and scissors from a wheelchair, Matisse developed a new sensory relationship with his material: the direct manipulation of flat color, the physical encounter with large sheets, the scissors as a drawing tool. The cut papers have qualities the paintings lack in the same way: a flatness, a directness, a relationship between figure and field that emerged from the sensory and procedural demands of the new method. Matisse described them as the pinnacle of his work. The constrained medium produced a new art materials and nervous system relationship, and the new relationship produced work the unconstrained practice could never have arrived at.

Chuck Close, following a spinal artery collapse in 1988 that left him largely paralyzed, continued making large-scale portraits using a brush strapped to his wrist and a grid system that broke each portrait into individually painted cells. The grid method was developed around what the changed body could do: the limited range of motion, the constrained fine motor capacity. What it also produced was a different quality of sensory engagement with the work: iterative attention to each mark, a physical relationship with the image at the scale of the cell rather than the scale of the whole canvas. Close has described this as a more intimate relationship with the making than the previous method had produced.

Louise Bourgeois, in the last decades of her long life, turned to fabric sculpture and stitched cloth works made from the household textiles of her mother’s tapestry-restoration shop. The material carried memory Bourgeois had been processing her whole career, and the physical engagement with cloth, needle, and thread produced a body of work as expressively charged as her bronze and marble sculpture, with a wholly different sensory register. The nervous system meeting fabric in her aging body was doing work the hard materials could no longer do in the same way.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s misfitting framework sits behind all three examples. The changed body, meeting a medium or a set of tools built for different capacities, produces friction. The friction forces attention. The attention, in turn, opens the possibility of a new sensory relationship with material that the fitted body never had occasion to build. What Matisse, Close, and Bourgeois make legible is that the art materials and nervous system relationship is most visible at the point where the old fit has broken and the new fit is being found.

When the Sensory Relationship Reverses

The research on art materials and nervous system regulation tends to focus on the regulating direction: the material that calms, the bilateral rhythm that quiets the internal noise, the medium that reliably delivers the maker back to themselves. This is the direction most worth documenting, because it is the least visible in mainstream creative discourse.

The other direction exists too, though.

A health change, a trauma, a medication shift, a period of sustained high stress, or the accumulation of difficult associations with a medium can reverse the sensory relationship entirely. The material that once regulated begins to activate. The fiber practice that reliably produced calm starts producing agitation instead. The studio that used to feel like safety starts feeling like demand. The hands that knew what to do in the familiar medium no longer recognize what they are touching.

This reversal is disorienting in a way that is hard to articulate, partly because the cultural script for craft and making runs almost entirely in the regulating direction. Knitting is supposed to calm you. Crochet is supposed to help. When it stops doing that, the maker tends to conclude that something has gone wrong with them rather than that the sensory relationship between their changed nervous system and a familiar material has shifted and needs to be renegotiated.

Peter Levine’s work on somatic experiencing is useful here. The body holds the history of what a material has meant, and a material that acquired difficult associations during a hard period carries those associations into every subsequent session. The hands pick up the familiar yarn and the nervous system reads the memory stored in that texture before any conscious intention arrives. The maker may have no idea why the beloved medium now feels wrong. The body knows before the mind does, and the body is reporting accurately.

The misfitting framework Rosemarie Garland-Thomson offers applies in this direction as well. The changed nervous system meeting a medium built for an earlier version of the maker’s body produces friction. The friction is information. It is asking the maker to pay attention to what the sensory relationship has become rather than what it used to be, to read the current fit rather than insisting on the remembered one.

This does not always mean leaving the medium. Sometimes the reversal is temporary and the relationship restores itself as the nervous system stabilizes. Sometimes a modification in how the medium is used, the scale, the pace, the setting, the time of day, resolves the dysregulation. Sometimes a different medium entirely is what the nervous system is asking for, and the maker’s work is to follow that request rather than override it.

What it always means is that the sensory experience of making is worth reading as information rather than managing as a problem. A material that used to help and has stopped helping is not evidence of a broken creative practice. It is evidence of a nervous system that has changed and is reporting honestly on what it now needs. The body keeps the score, as van der Kolk named it. In the studio, that means the hands know things the planning mind has not yet caught up with.

If you want to explore your sensory relationship with your materials is the kind of pattern work that Creative Health Cartography is designed to support through mapping and navigation sessions.

Would you rather explore this on your own? My Creative Health Cartography Workbook is a great place to start.

Writing from others:

With gratitude for the words you share , , , and

Oldster Magazine

How Dance Can Save Your Life

Two years ago I placed my left hand on the barre and, as the pianist plinked out a 4/4 refrain, sank into a demi plié—something I hadn’t done in thirty years. It was April Fools Day. What better day, I thought, to embarrass myself in public…

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a year ago · 230 likes · 91 comments · Martha Bayne

Making Things Up with Jane Pike

A Body-Based Way Back To Imagination (For When The Well Is Running Dry) ✏️

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nunotes

Sensoryscaping

Hello Everyone…

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2 years ago · 15 likes · 9 comments · Costanza Sofia M.

Better Home: Better Health with Michelle Ogundehin

Art Therapy

“The arts” are often spoken about as enrichment — something that adds colour once the serious business of life has been taken care of. Nice to have, but not essential. But neuroscience tells a different story…

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7 months ago · 138 likes · 19 comments · Michelle Ogundehin

Reaching towards an ecology of mind

Dancing with neurodiversity

I want to say that I want to amazing space think about the way I move to think I game the space the way I open with the body and the way I think which is the way of water It touches me open and I am away with really easy feelings of dancing for the answering really rare always rallying thinking and it is rare with the way people think Really way of t…

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2 years ago · 7 likes · 6 comments · Rebecca Todd

I’ve decided to try audio-only for the Create Me Free podcast. We’ll see how that feels for a little bit. We are entering the new territory of how health impacts our creative content. I hope you find something inspiring in the words.

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What Your Work Keeps Circling Back To

You paint a hospital room. You write a poem about someone who has passed away. You put a piano into a collage and cannot say why. On the surface, that’s subject matter: the thing your work is about. Underneath it sits something else, a set of questions the work keeps opening whether you meant it to or not.

I’ve come to think of that underneath layer as the real content of the work, and the surface layer as just the entry point. A painting of a hospital room might be about a hospital room. It might also be about waiting, or about what it feels like to be observed by people whose job is to observe you. Both are true at once. The second one is usually the reason the piece got made at all.

The Symptom That Becomes the Subject

Say your skin has given you trouble for years, the kind of thing that felt enormous at fourteen and still shows up in how you see yourself now. You are not likely to paint a self-portrait titled Acne. What shows up instead is a preoccupation with visibility. Faces, close up. The gap between how you feel on the inside and how you’re read from the outside. Shame, self-examination, the act of looking closely at something you’d rather look away from.

None of that requires you to name the skin condition anywhere in the piece. The symptom supplies the terrain and the content is what grows in it.

Detachment works the same way, from a different direction. Emotional distance can come from trauma, from a health condition, from the particular stage of an illness you’re in. It doesn’t usually show up as a piece about detachment. It shows up as a character who watches a room instead of joining it. A dance where one figure never quite crosses into the group that’s moving together. Cooler colors, cooler materials. You may be writing directly about what it feels like not to feel, or you may be writing an observer who wants in and can’t manage it, and only later recognize the two as the same story.

Why This Isn’t Always Visible From Inside

Both of these examples share something worth naming: the maker often can’t see the connection while they’re making the thing. The link between symptom and subject tends to become legible in retrospect, when you lay a body of work out and look at what you kept returning to across a stretch of time you weren’t paying close attention to while you lived through it.

That retrospective view is exactly what a written creative health map is built to do. It’s a different exercise than journaling or reflecting alone, because it holds the whole terrain in one place at once, rather than one piece or one week at a time. This is the kind of pattern that’s hard to see from inside your own practice and much easier to see from outside it, which is a lot of what mapping sessions are built to do: sit with someone across their body of work and name what keeps showing up, what it seems to be reaching toward, and what it might mean that it’s still there.

Order Your Creative Health Map

Content Isn’t Only What You Say Directly

There’s a version of this domain that assumes health-related content has to be autobiographical and explicit: the memoir, the illness narrative, the piece that names the diagnosis. Plenty of meaningful work does exactly that. But abstract work carries content too, even when nothing in it points at a subject in any literal way. If you’re writing fiction, dancing something out, building a piece with no representational image in it at all, there’s still a territory the work is circling. It’s just less obvious, which sometimes means it’s more honest, because you weren’t managing how it would read while you made it.

Where Other People Enter the Work

Content is also the place where other people show up in a way that doesn’t happen much in how you make or what materials you use. If the subject matter of your work is your own experience, and other people were present in that experience, questions of ethics and consent tend to follow close behind. Do you change names and identifying details. Do you ask before you put someone into a piece, or after, or not at all. There isn’t one right answer, and the question itself is part of what makes this domain different from the others: it’s the one most likely to involve someone besides you.

Learn more from the podcast episode.

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A working artist came to me last spring with a problem, a problem that I’ve encountered myself time and time again, a problem of money and its relationship to capacity as a creative.

She had fifteen years of practice, a strong audience, and even repeat collectors of her work. She also had a chronic illness that took twelve hours a week from her, at least, more during flares.

She couldn’t work enough to make enough money. She charged what her peers charged, pricing herself competitively in the market.. She could barely make rent. The issue was the math, not the work.

She had been comparing her rates to artists whose practices were structurally different from hers. Same medium, same market, same approximate reputation. Different bodies, different hours, different capacity. When she priced by comparison, she was pricing herself against people who had the time and energy she did not have. The rate that kept them solvent put her underwater.

Coming up with a new system wasn’t easy. It doesn’t work all of the time. But we got to something that works most of the time. And I want to share it with you today.

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Dear knitter who keeps yarn somewhere within reach, and who has never fully asked why that one in particular, or what it is doing when you reach for it,

Dear printmaker who returns to a certain kind of ink and paper during a difficult week with a reliability that has its own logic, even when that logic has no name,

Dear writer who in the worst moments reaches for something physical, for something to hold and work with that is made of more than words,

Dear musician who finds regulation in the instrument when nothing else helps, and who has learned to let that be what it is even when it produces nothing for the archive,

Dear woodcarver who returns to the same simple piece during difficult periods, hands doing something the mind cannot currently manage,

Dear human who has developed, through experience rather than through intention, a material relationship that functions as a form of return,

This is for you.

Perhaps the material you reach for when the world is too much has been chosen by your nervous system rather than by your aesthetic judgment.

The nervous system is continuously processing sensory information and making assessments about what helps the body find a manageable state and what makes the current state harder to sustain. These assessments happen below the level of conscious decision, which is why the reaching tends to happen before you have decided to reach. The hand moves toward the material before the mind has formed the intention. The body already knows.

What it knows is which sensory qualities of which material tend to shift the nervous system toward something more tolerable. The weight and warmth of a fiber under the hands. The resistance of a clay that pushes back just so. The predictability of a material that behaves consistently, without demanding cognitive engagement the current state has no room for. The repetitive motion that provides rhythm without requiring thought. The tangibility of something real and physical when everything that matters feels intangible and out of reach.

These are sensory and physiological experiences, and the fact that your body has identified which material provides them most reliably is a form of self-knowledge that tends to go undernamed, because it arrives through the body rather than through reflection and comes without a vocabulary. Sensory creative regulation is the name for what is happening: the body using creative material engagement to move toward a more manageable physiological state. It has been happening in your practice for longer than you may have recognized.

Please know that reaching for a particular material in a difficult moment is accurate rather than avoidant. It is the body doing something intelligent: accessing a form of regulation that makes it possible to continue functioning, to remain somewhat present, to stay in the world even when the world is too much to meet at full volume. The material is a way of being with the difficulty at a manageable level of intensity rather than at the level the full weight of it would impose without that mediation.

What if you attended to the material you reach for with some curiosity?

Where it lives in the sensory experience: what does the hand feel when it makes contact?

What does the body do in the first minutes of working with it? Where does tension shift?

What becomes slightly more possible after even a brief engagement that was less possible before?

And: what is it about this material more than others? Why yarn over clay? Why the pencil over the brush? Why this instrument over another? The choice is built from real physiological preference, and knowing what makes this one the material your body reaches for changes how deliberately available it can be. Sensory creative regulation understood explicitly is more available as a resource than sensory creative regulation that only arrives through instinct.

The material that holds you when the world is too much is part of your creative health. It belongs to the full picture of how making and health interact in your life. Understanding it more explicitly makes its function more legible, and makes it more deliberately available. You have developed, through experience, a resource that many people spend years looking for.

That is something to tend. I hope you will.

Love,

Kathryn

If my writing has ever touched or inspired you, consider support it in whatever way you can. Upgrade to a paid subscription. Leave a five star review for my podcast or workbook. Share the work with others in some way. It makes a difference.

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I enjoyed some fun things in July. I went to a bunny cafe. And a picnic at a winery. And the Chihara Shiota exhibit at the Asian Art Museum. And a friend’s drag opera in a church. And I read a whole lot of books.

And I wrote some things …

And recorded some podcast episodes:

On Threadstack:

Threadstack

Stitching Your Own Story: How to Use Fiber Arts to Witness Your Daily Life

What would it mean to make your own daily life the subject of your fiber practice? The actual texture of your days, the room you are in right now, the light from that window, what is on the table this morning, what your hands feel like today…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · Kathryn Vercillo

Threadstack

Billie Zangewa: One Stitch at a Time

Billie Zangewa did not plan to become a textile artist. Her degree was in printmaking. When she returned to Botswana after art school, she had no access to printmaking facilities. A friend had given her some silk from her grandmother’s trunk. That is how it started…

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2 months ago · 1 like · Kathryn Vercillo

And more:

Creative Restoration re-released my podcast episode about the benefits of crochet.

I was included in this terrific directory:

Illness and Insight

A Chronic Illness and Disability Substack Directory

Last Update 08/01/2026: We now have 250 writers on the list! What an incredible community. I have added everyone who commented, filled out the Google form, or DMed me. If you want to be listed in the next update, do one of those things. Apologies for any comments I didn’t respond to — I got a bit overwhelmed, but I am so grateful for the support, and I …

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a month ago · 317 likes · 207 comments · Sage Garrettson and Mariana Garrettson

A book I wrote a long time ago showed up on Facebook:

And someone on Threads shared a more recent book I wrote:

In 1988, Felix Gonzalez-Torres wrote a letter to his partner Ross Laycock. Ross had just been diagnosed HIV-positive during a routine appendectomy. There was no effective medical intervention once HIV transformed into AIDS. The diagnosis felt like a countdown.

In the letter, Gonzalez-Torres sketched a piece he was calling Lovers: two clocks, side by side, ticking in synchronization. He wrote:

“Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, the time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. We conquered fate by meeting at a certain time in a certain space. We are synchronized, now forever. I love you.”

The clocks became Untitled (Perfect Lovers), completed between 1987 and 1990. Two identical battery-operated wall clocks, mounted side by side, ticking together. One will eventually stop before the other. The work does not say this. It does not need to.

What Gonzalez-Torres built across the next eight years, working inside grief, illness, the AIDS crisis, and a political climate hostile to queer lives, is one of the most formally precise and enduring bodies of work in American art. His candy piles, paper stacks, billboards, string lights, the clock pairs: works whose physical continuation was built into their instructions rather than depending on his continued presence. He designed the practice to outlast him. It has, for thirty years and counting.\

After the paywall:

This analysis examines how Gonzalez-Torres’s health, circumstances, and the conditions of his life appear across all six areas of the Creative Health Cartography framework: how he made work, what the work addressed, what materials he chose, how much he produced and at what pace, who he understood himself to be as an artist, and how he structured the practice to sustain itself. The six areas together tell a story that no single angle of the biography captures.

• He built a practice designed to outlast his own body. Here is how he did it, formally and deliberately.

• The candy pile is a portrait. The weight is a person. The taking is a kind of grief.

• He called minimalism his camouflage. What he was hiding, and why the hiding was the point.

• How a biochemistry student’s way of understanding a virus ended up inside the physical logic of the work.

• The theory of the transitional object, and why a grieving artist’s candy pile maps precisely onto an infant’s blanket.

• Why the work refuses to say what it is, and why that refusal was survival.

• A museum quietly removed a dying man’s name from the label. Then the internet found out.

• A mental health program built around a pile of candy. The results were not what anyone expected.

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Hand a carpenter a hammer and something shifts in where she feels herself end. Researchers who study how the brain maps the body have shown that a well-used tool gets folded into that map. The reach of the hammer becomes the reach of the arm. A cane user feels the world at the tip of the cane, out on the pavement, rather than in the palm. A cellist feels the string through the bow. Over years of practice, your instruments stop being objects you pick up and become parts of the body you think with.

In my twenty years working where creativity meets health, that quiet fact is what makes a medium change land so hard. When arthritis, or fatigue, or a neurological shift takes a medium away, you lose more than a skill. You lose a piece of your extended body. That is why it grieves like a loss rather than reading like a scheduling problem, and why “just switch materials” lands as a small insult when a maker is in the thick of it.

Here is the more useful news,…

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There is a distinction to make between adaptation as consolation and adaptation as creative intelligence. The consolation version arrives too quickly at resolution, skipping over grief and dishonoring both the loss and the real discovery that eventually comes. It says the new practice is fine, the loss was secretly a gift, everything works out, when what is actually happening is an avoidance of the texture of the change.

Creative intelligence is different. It is the earned knowledge that develops when a constraint forces a real renegotiation with a medium, and when the artist is present enough to register what the renegotiation produces rather than simply surviving it. The constraint does the forcing. The presence does the registering. Together they generate understanding about the creative practice that the comfortable version never had to surface.

This piece looks at what creative intelligence is, where it comes from, and why creative adaptation under health constraints tends to produce it.

What Constraint Actually Forces

When health forces a change in the medium relationship, whether that change is in the physical demands the medium can make, the scale or duration the body can sustain, the tools that remain available, or a move to a different medium entirely, what the change forces is a ground-level renegotiation with the question of what the creative work actually requires.

The artist who can no longer work in the way she has worked has to ask, sometimes for the first time in years, what the medium is for. What it offers. What it requires. What can be maintained in a different form and what is inseparable from the physical relationship that has become less available. These questions are rarely abstract. They land in the studio and ask for answers the practice has to produce through continued making, through trial, through attention to what this body and this material can still do together.

The philosopher John Dewey, in Art as Experience, argued that a work is completed in the encounter between the work and the perceiver, and that the making itself is an ongoing encounter between the artist and the material as it resists and responds. The material is never passive. It is always doing something, and the artist is always answering. What constraint does, when it enters this exchange, is make the material’s side of the conversation louder. The easy path narrows, and the artist has to hear what the medium is offering rather than what habit had been extracting from it.

Creative intelligence develops here. In the hearing. In the answering. The earned knowledge the unconstrained practice never had to surface is the content of what the medium has been saying the whole time, made audible by conditions that forced the artist to listen.

Why Creative Adaptation and Health Belong in the Same Conversation

The disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes about what she calls misfitting. A misfit, in her framing, is the friction that arises when a body encounters a world, or a tool, or a medium, built for capacities the body does not share. The encounter produces something. Sometimes difficulty. Sometimes creative problem-solving of a kind the comfortable fit never asked for. Often both at once.

Garland-Thomson’s insight is that the misfit is productive. The friction is data. The body that has to figure out how to do this thing in this world with these capacities ends up learning something about the thing, the world, and itself that the well-fitted body has no occasion to learn. That knowledge is the misfit’s contribution. It is also the beginning of creative intelligence as the opening of this piece described it.

When health creates a misfit between a body and its medium, the friction starts doing its work. The artist who has had to think carefully about what her medium asks of her hands has a different and more accurate understanding of the hand-material relationship than an artist who has never had to examine it. The painter whose arms tire sooner than they used to has studied, through continuing to paint, where the real demands of the practice sit. The textile artist managing chronic pain has developed, through continued making, a kind of attention to her own process that an uninterrupted career never has to produce.

This is where disability justice frameworks and creative practice intersect in ways that still get underread. The scholar Alison Kafer, in Feminist, Queer, Crip, argues that disability is a political and relational category, shaped by the environments and expectations that surround the body, rather than a simple lack in the body itself. Applied to creative work, this means the so-called limitation of a disabling condition is often the meeting point between a body and a practice designed around different capacities. The adaptation is the artist building a practice that fits her actual body rather than inheriting one built for a different body entirely.

The adaptation that looks like a lesser version of the original is, under closer examination, the original practice reorganized around knowledge that ease had never required. Creative intelligence and creative adaptation turn out to be the same movement.

What Breath Has to Do With Medium

The body’s respiratory state is one of the most underacknowledged factors in the relationship between health and creative medium. Anxiety-driven shallow breathing produces a condition of low-level physiological activation that makes the quality of presence many mediums require harder to access. The painter who finds that her most difficult sessions begin with a physical sense of tightness in the chest has often found that attending to breath before and during the session changes what is available from the medium, in ways that have nothing to do with skill or aesthetic judgment.

The polyvagal researcher Stephen Porges has described how the nervous system moves among states of activation, regulation, and shutdown, and how the breath both reflects and shapes the state the body is in. Slow exhalation signals to the nervous system that the environment is safe, and the body comes out of defensive activation into a condition where attention can land. For the artist, what this means practically is that the nervous system arriving at the canvas shapes what the canvas can be to her on that day. A body in activation encounters a jittery medium. A body in regulation encounters a medium that can hold. The materials are identical. The artist, in a felt sense, is encountering a different medium.

This is the opposite of a productivity technique. It is the recognition that the body arriving at the medium carries a physiological state into the encounter, and that the physiological state shapes the affordances of the medium as surely as physical capacity does. The medium changes according to who is meeting it.

Somatic practitioners, from Eugene Gendlin’s work on focusing to the body-based psychotherapies that followed, have long described a related phenomenon: that the body knows things before the cognitive mind catches up, and that a slower, fuller breath creates the room for that knowledge to arrive in language. Transferred into the studio, the implication is that the artist who attends to her own breath is preparing the ground for the medium to speak and for her to hear it.

Creative adaptation that works, in this light, includes attending to the bodily state being brought to the medium, alongside adapting the medium to the bodily state. Both directions of the relationship have something to offer. Both feed the creative intelligence the piece opened with: the knowledge that comes from being present to what is actually happening in the encounter between this body, this day, and this material.

What Goya, Faith Ringgold, and Others Show About Constraint

Francisco de Goya became progressively deaf from his mid-forties onward. His late-period works, the Black Paintings he executed directly onto the plaster walls of his own house, represent a full departure from the commissioned canvases of his earlier career. The materials, the surface, the scale, the process, the absence of any anticipated audience, all changed at once. What the conditions of his life produced was work of a kind he had never made before, organized around a different relationship with the medium and the act of making altogether. The Black Paintings are dark, private, unmannered, uninterested in approval. They could have come from no earlier period of his practice, because no earlier period was living under these conditions.

Faith Ringgold’s decision to work in quilts, beginning in 1980, was driven in part by the practical reality that large-format canvas paintings were difficult to transport and show in the way her work required, and in part by her deepening engagement with the African American quilt-making traditions she had grown up among. The quilt format solved a logistical problem. It also produced the work she is most known for: story quilts that combine painting, quilted fabric, and written text in a form inseparable from the conditions that generated it. The adaptation produced more than a lesser painting practice. It produced something the painting practice on its own could never have arrived at.

Both older and more recent examples repeat the pattern with different materials. Henri Matisse, bedridden in the final years of his life after cancer surgery, invented the cut-out as a full body of work, using scissors and painted paper when the easel and brush were beyond the reach of where his body was. The cut-outs are now considered some of the most inventive work of his career, and Matisse himself described them as a second life in painting rather than an ending of the first. Frida Kahlo, painting from the bed her injuries confined her to, with a specially designed easel and a mirror fixed to the canopy, developed the psychological self-portraiture she is known for because those were the conditions she was painting from. Claude Monet’s late water-lily paintings, made as his cataracts progressively altered his vision, carry the color changes of the failing sight into the work itself, producing the near-abstract luminosity of the Orangerie panels.

None of these are triumph stories. None of these artists would be likely to say the loss was a gain in disguise, or that the constraint turned out in their favor. What the work says, read carefully, is that constraint forced a full renegotiation with the medium, and the artists who renegotiated with attention produced work the pre-constraint practice could never have generated. The creative intelligence in the work is the intelligence the renegotiation built. It belongs to the conditions of its making, and the conditions included the constraint.

What Unfamiliar Materials Teach About Presence

The relationship between a medium and the artist’s nervous system becomes most legible when the medium is newly encountered. For example, artists who have experimented with neon, a material that demands sustained attention to a physically demanding and materially unforgiving process, often describe a quality of presence in the making that their established mediums had organized into automaticity. The neon demands full attention at every moment. There is no autopilot available. The demand, for artists used to more forgiving materials, produces a quality of creative engagement that the familiar practice had long since stopped asking for.

The phenomenon generalizes. An oil painter who picks up stone carving, a digital illustrator who moves to letterpress, a fiber artist who learns metal soldering, describes a similar re-entry. The muscle memory is gone. The intuitive sense of how the material will behave is gone. What is left is the artist, present, paying attention to what this material is doing in this moment, answering as she goes. The anthropologist Tim Ingold, in Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, argues that making is always a correspondence between the maker and the material as it unfolds, and that habitual practice tends to cover over this correspondence under the smooth surface of expertise. The unfamiliar material strips the covering away. The correspondence becomes visible again because the maker has to see it.

This is one of the through-lines creative adaptation and health share. Both force the artist into presence because the comfortable pathway has become unavailable. Whether the constraint comes from the body, from a new material, or from conditions that changed mid-career, what the constraint produces is the artist having to be entirely with what the medium is doing and what the body has available. The habits that used to manage the process can no longer do their managing. The artist has to be there.

Creative intelligence, as the opening described it, is the knowledge that develops in exactly these conditions. It is the knowledge that develops when the automatic pathway closes and the artist has to meet the medium awake. Whether the closing comes from health or from a new material, the presence the closing forces is what generates the intelligence. The conditions produce the intelligence. The intelligence then belongs to the work.

The intelligence that develops through forced creative adaptation belongs to the experience of having been constrained. It cannot be reverse-engineered from outside. It has to be built in the practice and then recognized once built. That recognition, and what to do with it, is the kind of pattern work that Creative Health Cartography is designed to support through mapping and navigation sessions.

Would you rather explore this on your own? My Creative Health Cartography Workbook is a great place to start.

Writing from others:

With gratitude for the words you share , , , and

Deleyna’s Drift

Awareness

Before any real change begins, there is a moment that is easy to miss. A small tug. A sense of friction. A tool that no longer feels comfortable in your hands. A routine that once supported you but now leaves you strangely tired. A thought that flickers, then disappears before you can name it…

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9 months ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Deleyna Marr

Plagues, Pollution & Poverty

Goya’s Haunted Palette

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Creativity 4 Life

BELIEFS & CREATIVITY

Thanks for reading Creativity 4 Life! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work…

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5 months ago · Dr Alisdair Wiseman

.925 Fashion Arts Mag

On embracing creative limitations without romanticizing suffering

What inspired this last makeup look was my big dumb stye…

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Bureau of Queer Art

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There are ways of looking that flatten what they touch…

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5 months ago · 2 likes · The Bureau of Queer Art

Maya’s Creative Health Map

Dear Maya,

Thank you for trusting me with your creative world. I have deeply enjoyed our conversations so far and look forward to continuing to work with you on navigating your creative terrain.

After our first two sessions, I have sat down and reflected upon what you shared, looking for the places where your health and creativity intersect, shape each other, and sometimes chafe against one another.

What I found is someone who has developed inspiring wisdom about choosing materials and methods that accommodate anxiety and grief rather than fighting against them, and who is rebuilding what creativity means in the midst of caregiving, parenting, and loss.

This written map is a version of the terrain as I understand it from the outside, but of course you know this terrain far better than I can from two conversations. Read it for what resonates. Notice what does not fit. Sit with what surprises you. Let it be a starting point for our conversation. We will orient to all of this in our next call when you are ready.

Kathryn

You Are Here

You are a poet who has been making work for twenty-two years, the kind of person for whom the poem is a way of being in the world, more than just what you “do” for creative work. You also make collage, which is separate from the poetry to an extent, but it feeds it, gives it imagery, gives you a way to find the picture before you find the words.

Six years ago, fibromyalgia arrived and rearranged the conditions under which all of this is possible. The pain is the loudest thing sometimes but other times closer to background noise … More like “static underneath everything else” was your phrase that echoed for me. The nervous system that your creative work depends on is the same nervous system that chronic pain lives in; that is the central fact of your creative life right now.

You are at your desk. You can see the work. The lantern is in your hand. The water is right there. But you can’t seem to cross over into finding a way to create poetry and collage that makes sense for who you are now, including the needs you have as someone living with the effects of fibromyalgia.

What seems to be present is accumulated weight rather than an absence of ability or vision or intelligence: things sealed, things depleted, a self still being measured against a former self who no longer exists in the same form.

The Six Areas of Creative Health

Process: How the Work Happens

What May Be Flourishing

You know exactly how you work. The fragment-based process, finding an image and living with it before writing into it, is a sophisticated and considered approach to poetry. It requires interior quiet and a particular quality of attention. That you know this about yourself, that you have twenty-two years of understanding how your process works, is a resource many poets do not have. Don’t underestimate it.

Possible Blocks

The threshold, the moment of crossing from outside the work to inside it, seems to have become unreliable. The nervous system that the crossing requires is the same one that chronic pain has made unpredictable.

What seems to be happening is that you have forgotten the way in. The conditions the work requires are no longer reliably available. That is a different problem with different possible responses. On the days when the body is available, the crossing is possible. On the days when pain arrives as static, the outside/inside distinction collapses and you are left standing at the edge. Naturally, this is frustrating and creates blocks in your work.

Medium: What You Make With

What May Be Flourishing

You have two mediums that sustain each other. Poetry and collage are one practice in two registers. The collage finds the image, the poetry finds the words. This is a unique creative arrangement and one of your particular strengths as a maker.

Possible Blocks

The collage practice has effectively stopped. The fine motor demands of cutting and placing became too painful and frustrating about four years into the fibromyalgia diagnosis. You put everything down and didn’t go back. The table has been “a sealed room” in your words.

What seems worth naming is that this closing has had a ripple effect that may not be fully visible: the collage was where you found your imagery. Without the table, the primary source of imagery for the poetry has also been closed. The well the poetry draws from has been sealed from another direction. So perhaps you will want to find a way to collage that works for you now or perhaps you’ll want to find another way into the imagery of poetry.

Content: What the Work Is About

What May Be Flourishing

You have a manuscript. You know what it wants to be. You can describe individual poems that belong in it. That clarity of vision for a whole collection is something every poet has access to, and you have it. The manuscript exists in your mind in its complete form. Celebrate that!

Possible Blocks

The manuscript was begun before the diagnosis. Some of what you consider to be its best work comes from the before. You have been sitting with a question: how to finish it as the poet you are now while honoring the poet who began it. The question of which self finishes it is the obstacle. An identity problem in writing-problem’s clothes.

What I am curious about: whether the poet you are now, the one with access to the interior world of illness and the knowledge that living in a changed body produces, might have something to add to this manuscript rather than something to compensate for.

Productivity: Volume and Rhythm

What May Be Flourishing

The morning window is when you can work. You named it with precision: the body is most available before pain escalates, and early light is when the work is most possible. That is knowledge about your own creative capacity, and it is actionable in a way that general aspirations about writing more are often not.

Possible Blocks

The freelance prose work for clients consumes the language first. By the time you arrive at your own desk, the “well is empty”. You described this with flat resignation, as if it were simply the cost of survival, and perhaps it is. It seems worth sitting with whether the arrangement has been questioned recently or whether the resignation has become its own kind of seal.

Identity: The Inner Story

What May Be Flourishing

You know you are a poet. That hasn’t changed. The certainty underneath the doubt, the fact that the question of whether you are still a poet is even painful enough to matter, is evidence that the identity is intact even while it is under pressure.

Possible Blocks

Six years ago a rupture happened. The poet before the diagnosis and the poet after feel like two people, and you have been holding those two selves separately for six years without naming that holding as the complicated heavy work it actually is.

You measure the work you make now against the work you made before. You suspect the comparison is unfair. You even suspect some of the current work may be better. You cannot trust that assessment because the measuring happens faster than the trusting.

What seems to be true is this: you haven’t been given permission to be the poet you became after the diagnosis rather than the poet you were before it. That permission is not something someone else can give you. And you might be finding it hard to give it to yourself right now. But it can be named, and naming it is usually where it begins.

Business and Sustainability

What May Be Flourishing

You have sustained a creative practice and a survival income through six years of significant health challenges. The freelance work, whatever its costs, has kept you writing, housed, and functioning. It sounds frustrating that it has so much of your healthy time, and it’s good to notice that, mourn that and find ways to shift it, but it’s also valuable to honor that you’ve done this.

Possible Blocks

The arrangement (freelance clients get your energy) seems to have been accepted rather than chosen. Whether that acceptance is accurate, whether the actual constraints are what they appear to be, is an area this map cannot assess fully from the outside. It is an area that seems worth returning to and exploring solutions for.

Cross-Area Patterns

None of the six areas of our creative terrain really exist in isolation. Here are some of the cross-area patterns I noticed in our conversations.

The Sealed Rooms

You used the word “sealed” and other words similar to it a lot. The collage table is sealed. The manuscript is sealed. The before and after is sealed. You have a pattern across several areas of sealing what is too painful to approach and then losing access to the resources those things contain. The collage table contained your imagery. The manuscript contained your most considered poetic voice. The before and after contains your permission to be the poet you actually are now.

The sealed rooms are protection, reached for when something needed protecting. It is absolutely necessary to protect ourselves sometimes, especially when first dealing with a diagnosis. What seems worth exploring is whether any of them are ready to be opened, and in what order, and in what company.

The Well and Its Sources

The empty well was an image you shared that really stuck with me. The depletion is about more than the freelance work although it starts there. The well is empty from multiple directions: the collage practice that used to replenish your imagery has stalled, the manuscript that used to give your writing direction feels old, and the creative identity that used to give you confidence is measured against a self that no longer exists. The freelance work takes from a well that several other things have also stopped filling. But there will be ways to refill that well.

The Measuring

You cannot stop measuring what you make now against what you made before. This measuring appears in how you enter the work, in what you believe about the manuscript, in how you assess your current poems, in how you understand your productivity. It is the cross-area pattern that amplifies every other block.

What seems worth noticing: you said yourself that some of the current work might actually be better. The measuring is giving you a consistent verdict rather than accurate information.

Summary of the Creative Landscape

Where You Are

Standing at the edge of the water with a lantern. The work is visible. The tools are in your hands. The body is unreliable and the well is low and the rooms you sealed are still sealed. You are close to the work but you are stopped at the threshold by accumulated weight that hasn’t been fully named. You are also here, doing this work, ready to navigate new terrain.

Where You Want To Be

A morning creative practice before anything else, waking up and spending the energy you have on the things that nourish you.

You want the manuscript finished, as the poet you are now, with whatever that version of you brings to it. This means that you would love to have the collage table open again, in some form the hands can manage.

“A practice that feels like mine.” You used that phrase. That is the destination.

What Is In Between

The chronic pain weather system, unpredictable and ever-present, which makes the threshold crossing unreliable and the well refilling slow. The sealed rooms: the collage table, the manuscript, the permission to be the current poet. The empty well, depleted from multiple directions. The measuring, which keeps the former self present as a standard the current self cannot meet. The last mile: you can see where you want to go clearly, but sustaining the focus long enough to cross the final distance has become its own obstacle.

Possible Helpful Practices

Based on what emerged in our conversations, here are five practices to sit with. Take what resonates. Leave what does not. We can discuss these further in future calls if you would like.

1. The Ten-Minute Morning. Before the freelance work, before email, before anything that uses the language for someone else: ten minutes at your own desk. To write the manuscript. To produce anything. Just to be at the desk first. The threshold practice begins before the crossing, with the habit of arriving before the depletion.

2. Standing at the Table. You went to look at the collage table after our first session and stood there for ten minutes. That was already the practice. You don’t have to touch anything although you can. Standing in front of what has been sealed and letting yourself look is a form of returning. The hands don’t have to cut yet. The eyes can return first.

3. The Current Poet Reading the Manuscript. Read what you have of the manuscript as if you are a reader encountering it for the first time, not as the poet who wrote it. Notice what the manuscript seems to want from the poet who will finish it. You may find that who it wants is closer to who you are now than you have been willing to believe.

4. The Fragment Jar. Write one fragment. One image, one line, one observation. Write it on a slip of paper and put it in a jar. Do this every day. Do it a few times a day if you’re moved to do so. The jar is a draft. It is evidence that the poet is still here even when the practice is accessible. The fragments can be read later, or not.

5. The One Permission. There is one thing you seem to need permission for that hasn’t been given: to be the poet you became rather than the poet you were. Write yourself a permission slip for exactly what you need.

What Comes Next

You have the written map in your hands. You also have a visual map arriving with this document. Sit with both before we meet again. When you are ready, you can schedule your orientation call here.

Session Three is the orientation session. We will walk through the map together. You will tell me what resonates and what does not, what I have gotten wrong, what surprises you, and what you might notice as impressions from the visual map. After that, we’ll have two more sessions in which we can navigate this terrain and work through the areas that feel most poignant for you.

The work is to see the terrain clearly enough that you can begin to navigate it in a way that is honest about what is actually there. You have already come so far in laying out the terrain where we can see it. I look forward to navigating it with you.

Kathryn

Note: Maya is a composite client. This was built primarily from the experience of mapping with one client who gave me permission to share with identifying details changed. I included additional information incorporated from three other clients to further anonymize the original.

Work With Me

The standard advice about creative practice goes something like this: block time, show up consistently, protect your focus. For a body with a stable and predictable energy supply, that advice is reasonable. For a body without one, it tends to produce guilt rather than work.

Weekly planning for artists with chronic illness starts from a different premise. The question is how to read what is actually available on a given day and match the creative work to that, rather than matching the day to an ideal that was never designed for your body.

I have practiced this for years. It has changed how I work more than any schedule or productivity system I have tried.

What I want to offer here is a planning framework built around what is actually available, rather than what “should” be available. It requires a small shift in how you think about creative capacity, and then a practical tool you can build in about twenty minutes and use every day after that.

After the paywall:

• The four types of creative capacity and why they fluctuate independently

• The theory behind why standard productivity planning fails variable-capacity bodies

• An artist whose entire practice was built around the logic of replenishment

• A weekly planning structure that matches work to what is actually available each day

• A two-minute session check-in you can use tomorrow

• The weather system question for longer-view reflection

• The one question that surfaces adaptations you have already made without naming them

Read more

In twenty years of working at the intersection of creativity and health, I have found that surprisingly few artists think about their medium in terms of what it actually does to their nervous system during the making. Whether a material is wet or dry, repetitive or unpredictable, tactile or visual, controlled or open-ended: these are more than aesthetic variables. They engage different sensory systems with different intensities. They have different effects on the nervous system’s regulation.

This episode goes into that research and into the frameworks that help explain it, alongside a close look at Chuck Close’s work after the 1988 spinal collapse that left him perman…

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Dear artist who, at some point in the last few years, began moving toward making that holds you physically present,

Dear performer who noticed yourself leaning into the live, the unrepeatable, the work that exists only in the moment of its making and cannot be reproduced without the body that made it,

Dear embroiderer who found yourself drawn toward hand-stitched work with a deliberateness you had to pay attention to before you understood it,

Dear craftsperson who found that what felt like retreat was actually a form of discovery,

Dear illustrator who moved from digital toward paper and ink without fully understanding at first why,

Dear maker who went looking for work that asks for your hands and found, in that looking, something more alive than you expected,

Dear artist who is still working out whether what you found was what you were looking for or something more interesting than that,

This is for you.

Whatever combination of instinct and drawing-toward led you here, the reaching has been accurate. You have been moving toward what your body knows how to do, toward what presence in physical materials actually offers.

You find things in the physical materials that you had not fully registered before. The way a specific material responds to specific hands. The way fiber does what it does and then what it does against your intention. The way paint applied in a specific physical state, at a specific moment of the day, in a specific emotional register, produces something that could have come from no prior decision.

These experiences have always been available. What has shifted is your attention. The qualities of embodied creative practice, the unpredictability, the resistance to replication, the deep relationship with the specific body doing the work at the specific moment of doing it, are legible to you now as qualities. As things the making offers.

I have come to see this turn as a form of creative health work, even when it is not framed that way. When I look at medium as the full physical, emotional, and sensory relationship with how you make, what you are doing when you turn toward embodied, material, irreplicable making is attending to that relationship with new intention. You are asking what this medium offers, what it requires, what it produces in this body right now, rather than what it produces in general or in theory.

“What does making actually offer when it requires my specific body and my specific presence?” is a creative health question. And I think it is the question you have been asking, whether or not you have put it in those words.

So let me ask you directly:

What did you find when you turned in this direction?

What is in the physical making that you had perhaps not fully registered before?

What does working in a medium that requires your presence, your hands, your specific body at a specific moment, give you that other forms of making have not given you in the same way?

These are questions your embodied creative practice has already begun to answer. The answers live in what the work felt like when it was going, in what the body did in those sessions, in what arrived that you had expected and what arrived that you had not. The practice has been gathering information. The looking is the invitation to collect it.

What you went looking for may have been what you needed. What you found may be more than you expected. Both of those things are present in what the body-engaged making has been producing.

Love,

Kathryn

If my writing has ever touched or inspired you, consider support it in whatever way you can. Upgrade to a paid subscription. Leave a five star review for my podcast or workbook. Share the work with others in some way. It makes a difference.

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My June included seeing a Frameline film festival film at Roxie and cabaret at Martuni’s, seeing extended family from graduations and out of town guests, coastal drive for mead tasting, East Bay drive for Blackhawk museum, small art workshop and lots of stuff around the house.

Changes Around Here

Things are shifting around here a little bit to adapt to my changing energy and needs. Instead of doing weekly artist letters and themed posts, I’m going to start doing them monthly. And I’ll be adding two paywalled posts per month: a deep How To guide and a deep dive into an artist’s health + creativity. And over on Threadstack will be another two paywalled posts, similar to those, but geared towards fiber artists and yarn lovers. Podcast episodes will continue weekly for now.

Check out the first two paywalled articles:

Here’s what else I wrote and shared in June:

Dear Artist

June Themes

Podcast Episodes

Creative Health Cartography Workbook Tour

I am so grateful to the people who shared my work on their Substacks in participation with my virtual book tour.

Special gratitude to my June stops: , , , , and

On Threadstack:

Threadstack

Can I Engage in Mindful Slow Stitching with Machine Sewing?

When people hear the term slow stitching, they often picture delicate hand-sewn stitches, needle and thread moving methodically through fabric, and a quiet, meditative creative process. But does that mean machine sewing can’t be a form of slow stitching…

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2 months ago · 1 like · Kathryn Vercillo

Threadstack

Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective at BAMPFA (republished)

I originally wrote this piece as an exhibit review for Sartle in early 2020 when I attended the Rosie Lee Tompkins retrospective at BAMPFA, just before the pandemic closed the museum. I am republishi…

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3 months ago · 2 likes · Kathryn Vercillo

On Medium:

• Constraint as Teacher: 8 Things Artists Discover When Health or Circumstance Forces a New Relationship with Medium

• Six Ways Health Changes the Creative Process

• What Your Body Remembers About Every Medium You’ve Ever Touched: 8 Things the Creative Medium History Reveals

Words From Others:

Over decades of interviews with artists navigating health conditions, I have found that this tends to happen through a handful of recognizable patterns. The chronic pain that ended someone’s ability to stand at an easel. The medication that quieted the cross-contamination between parallel creative tracks. The fatigue that changed what duration of work was possible. The neurological change that altered how the brain constructed an image. All of these produced different work than would have existed otherwise.

This episode is the theory episode in the current series on creative medium. I work through seven mechanisms for how health changes medium, alongside the dis…

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If you missed any stops along the way, you can catch up with them again here. More importantly, I want to make sure that you get to know the amazing people who are writing on Substack and supported this tour so you’ll also find links to some of the best pieces of their work. Please check them out, support who you love, share their work, etc.

Stop 1: of Studio Diaries

Shared my essay on creative consistency:

Studio Diaries

Why creative people struggle with consistency (and what actually helps)

As creatives, the struggle to stay consistent with our art practice is very real! No matter how many systems we set up and how many good intentions we have, somewhere along the way, our practice falters. It could be caused by an artist’s block, life getting in the way, or the simple fact that artists need time to ref…

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4 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Shinjini

One of Shinjini’s best pieces for you to check out is Escaping the graveyard of abandoned ideas, about which she shares:

“If you’ve ever experienced the rush of starting a new project, only for that excitement to fizzle out in a few days and for your idea to get tossed to the side, I wrote this for you!”

Studio Diaries

Escaping the graveyard of abandoned ideas

You know that feeling of being filled with fizzy energy? Of bubbling excitement and untamed enthusiasm? It’s the feeling you get when you think of an exciting new project or idea, driven by dopamine and shiny new project syndrome…

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a year ago · 12 likes · 12 comments · Shinjini

Stop 2: of Creativity 4 Life

Shared my essay on the psychology behind creative blocks:

Creativity 4 Life

The Creative Health Cartography Workbook Virtual Book Tour

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Kathryn Vercillo, inviting me to participate in a virtual book tour for her new work, the Creative Health Cartography Workbook. I came into contact with Kathryn when I subscribed to her Substack as part of my prep for launching Creativity 4 Life. All my research suggested that it was important to sign up to other cre…

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4 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Dr Alisdair Wiseman

Alisdair shared:

“Welcome to Creativity 4 Life lays out my proposition: a solid creative identity is all you need to be creative for the rest of your life. It highlights the myths I intend to bust, the problem with conventional definitions of creativity, and confirms that every person on the planet is innately creative because creativity is an evolutionary adaptation. It also hints at what’s in store.”

Learn more:

Creativity 4 Life

WELCOME TO CREATIVITY 4 LIFE

Welcome…

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6 months ago · Dr Alisdair Wiseman

Stop 3: of Methods and Madness

Shared my essay on on how business and creative health aren’t separate:

Methods and Madness

The Business Side of Creative Life Is a Creative Health Issue

Dear reader…

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4 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Meredith Lewis and Kathryn Vercillo

One of the best pieces Meredith has for you to check out is Tenebrize, about which she says:

“Into the dark we go, looking for the fragments of our creative selves hiding there.”

Methods and Madness

Tenebrize

Dear reader…

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2 years ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · Meredith Lewis

Stop 4: of Creative Fix

Shared my essay on the nervous system’s role in creative life:

Creative Fix

What Your Nervous System Has to Do With Making Things

Kathryn Vercillo is releasing a new workbook…

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4 months ago · 23 likes · 7 comments · Allegra Chapman (she/her)

Learn more about Allegra’s inspiring creative work:

Creative Fix

Start Here

Welcome home, creative soul…

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a year ago · 3 likes

Stop 5: of Living By Making

Shared my thoughts on the difference between rest and avoidance for creatives with health challenges:

Tim ONeill

The Difference Between Creative Rest and Creative Avoidance

This is a guest post from Kathryn Vercillo as part of her Creative Health Cartography Workbook tour. I've lost more studio hours to this exact question than I care to admit. Am I resting, or am I just hiding? Kathryn does something here that I find genuinely rare: she doesn't shame either answer. She just helps you see more clearly what's actually going…

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4 months ago · 9 likes · Tim ONeill and Kathryn Vercillo

A related post by Tim to check out:

Tim ONeill

Slow living doesn't mean an empty calendar

Living by Making | Issue 14…

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4 months ago · 2 likes · Tim ONeill

Stop 6: Undone by

Shared my piece on how grief and loss change creativity:

UNDONE

Creativity After Loss

This week I’m hosting a guest essay by Kathryn Vercillo, author of Create Me Free on Substack. Kathryn reached out a few weeks ago to ask whether I would participate in her Workbook Tour for Creative Health Cartography: The Workbook — a research-grounded, deeply practical guide for artists, writ…

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4 months ago · 27 likes · Manuela Thames and Kathryn Vercillo

A piece I love by Manuela:

UNDONE

Holding Multitudes

I didn’t realize it at first, but if you’ve read my last two posts, you may have noticed that one was about grief and the beauty of memories, while the other was about beauty itself - about experiencing it in profound but fleeting moments throughout our days and weeks, if only we stay open and aware…

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4 months ago · 51 likes · 27 comments · Manuela Thames

Stop 7: of The Artist’s Journal

Shared my essay on what healthy sustainability means in a creative life:

The Artist's Journal

The Sustainable Creative Practice

Quick note: this is a resend because it didn’t go out to all subscribers the first time. I’m so glad it’s getting to your inbox now…

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3 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Emily Geleske

The piece of Emily’s to check out is this one about which Emily says:

“Even if someone calls it delusional, I’m still choosing to make art - I believe in perusing what feels true, holding on to possibility, seeing beauty, and in creating a life that feels meaningful to me.”

The Artist's Journal

Delusional, Apparently, but Still Making Art Anyway.

Someone called me delusional a few days ago…

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a year ago · 20 likes · 12 comments · Emily Geleske

Stop 8: of Heartbeats

Shared my essay on the creative’s imperative to rest:

Heartbeats

The Politics of Rest

Hello…

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3 months ago · 6 likes · 6 comments · Mariah Friend and Kathryn Vercillo

The piece of Mariah’s to check out is about “what a week of solo parenting taught me about creating sustainably.”

Heartbeats

Why consistency doesn't work for me

Hi! If you’re new to Heartbeats, welcome. I’m Mariah, and I write about the messy, beautiful intersection of caregiving and creativity. Today’s letter is about choosing trust over consistency, and what pink eye taught me about sustainable creative practice. Heartbeats is a reader-supported community. Thank you for being here…

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a year ago · 6 likes · 11 comments · Mariah Friend

Stop 9: of Lemon Soul

Shared my love letter to long form writing:

Lemon Soul by Emma Simpson

Why I Still Believe in Long-Form Writing in an Age That Wants Short

A Guest Essay…

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3 months ago · 15 likes · 5 comments

The piece of Emma’s to check out is “Publication is not all that it’s cracked up to be...but writing is.”

Lemon Soul by Emma Simpson

"Publication is not all that it's cracked up to be...

Bird by Bird…

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2 years ago · 79 likes · 56 comments · Emma Simpson

Stop 10: of A life (Extra) Ordinary

shared a Q&A with me about burnout and creative blocks:

A Life (Extra) Ordinary

Prose & Convos #7

In late 2022 I founded an open-mic program called Prose & Convos. Borne of a desire to give more writers a voice, the program encouraged writers to share a piece of prose or poetry on stage in front of a safe and non-judgemental audience. A simple black-box theatre held space for these writers - some just starting out, …

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3 months ago · 15 likes · Monique Mulligan and Kathryn Vercillo

Here’s a piece to check out from Monique, about which she says: “The insidious creep of busy-ness invites a reminder to tread lightly.”

A Life (Extra) Ordinary

Tread lightly: a note to self

My house today smells of chocolate, butter and mandarins; a rich mocha ganache is cooling while chocolate marmalade cupcakes bake to perfection. Later, I will pipe ganache onto the cakes and we will enjoy a decadent kaffee und kuchen; now, as a bouquet of mouth-watering smells reaches my nose, I am w…

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7 months ago · 27 likes · 9 comments · Monique Mulligan

Stop 11: of your Creative Letter

Shared my essay applying creativity to the idea that “the body keeps score”

Your Creative Letter

It is said: ''The Body Keeps the Creative Score''

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3 months ago · 8 likes · Keva Epale and Kathryn Vercillo

Keva has “a piece about the hidden pain behind creative work. How artists carry physical pain, discomfort, and injury as part of their craft” that is “a great compliment to the workbook’s purpose and mindset.” Read here:

Your Creative Letter

Art Bruises: when creativity hurts

👋 Dear creative. How are you doing today…

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a year ago · 8 likes · 4 comments · Keva Epale

Stop 12: of Divergent Menopause

wrapped up the tour with my guest essay for people who like the idea of creativity workbooks but never actually finish them.

Divergent Menopause

How to Use The Creative Health Cartography Workbook If You Never Finish Workbooks

Hello and welcome to Divergent Menopause, previously known as The Autistic Perimenopause: A Temporary Regression…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · Sam Galloway (she/her) 💕 and Kathryn Vercillo

Sam is “a late diagnosed AuDHDer, tenacious midlife struggler, and unapologetic neurodivergent menopause advocate.” Learn more:

Divergent Menopause

Fiercely advocating to raise awareness on temporary fluctuations and regressions in capacity during our neurodivergent perimenopause and beyond. A safe space for our community to unmask, co-regulate, and share knowledge to self-advocate.

By Sam Galloway (she/her) 💕

Massive gratitude again to each of these amazing people who shared my work and added their own thoughts along the way.

And then I had to change my medium again because of my health.

People say it with resignation. With dark humor. Sometimes with surprise at how many reinventions one creative life can hold. It comes up whether I’m talking with someone navigating chronic pain, a late ADHD diagnosis, grief, or a long stretch of depression that made words temporarily inaccessible. The medium shifted. The body had different terms. Health impacts medium.

In this episode, I walk through my own medium biography, prompt by prompt, from the friendship bracelets of fourth grade through the crochet that found me in my twenties through the collage and podcast work I’m doing now.

In this episode:

The medium biography is one of the exercises I return to most often in one-on-one s…

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You have probably tried the standard “creativity”/ “productivity” advice. Showed up every day, or tried to. Made the fifteen-minute plan. Set the alarm. Built the habit. And then the flare came, or the depression came, or the caretaking came, or simply the particular kind of Tuesday morning when your body had information that overrode everything you intended, and the plan collapsed.

You may have concluded that this means something about you. That real artists are “more disciplined”, “more committed”, “less flaky” … “more” something or "less” something than you manage to be. That your body is the problem. It’s not. I promise, it’s not.

Your body is doing exactly what bodies do. The template is the problem. You can change the template.

After the paywall:

• Four-tier framework for creative productivity on days with different capacities

• Creating a minimum viable practice protocol

• Re-entry guide for coming back to creativity after a bad health stretch

• Related theory to ground it all

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