Let’s take a trip down memory lane. The year is 2021, and on the whole, artists still enjoy sharing their work online. It feels like a good deal, you make something, then you show it, people seem to like it. You open doors for yourself, you can network and get some forward momentum for offering a glimpse into your studio that feels appropriate. It’s an exchange that feels befitting to the effort that’s going in.

Now let us meet again in 2026, can we honestly say that artists still feel the same? I’m not sure that we can.

So let us agree on some things first and take them as a given for the next several minutes so that we don’t keep tripping over them. Rent needs to be paid. Food needs to be eaten. None of this piece is an argument against making a living as an artist (I am a working artist), and none of it comes from a place that imagines an artist should be above money. Let’s also be honest that ninety nine percent of artists maintaining a presence online are doing so in search of a career or a financial gain to some degree, and that is entirely reasonable. Wanting your work to support you is not a corruption of work, we are simply talking about the conditions around us that facilitate that being possible.

One more thing to acknowledge to set the tone for the whole discussion. An exit route is always available. I personally know a sculptor who is truly a genius of his craft. He's a lecturer, a teacher. He is the real deal in every sense of the word. He has zero interest in an online presence. He simply works in his own way, his own medium, and he is entirely comfortable and happy with his existence. That option exists at any moment for every living artist. I’m gonna come back to him in a bit. I think it's fair to say that nobody is actually trapped online. Even when it feels kind of like that and knowing that no one is a prisoner offers honesty as a front load to this piece.

Subscribe now

I'm thinking about a couple of things explicitly that are glaringly, painfully obvious right now for most artists working around the world.

An artist now has to run two entirely different minds, and they aren't incredibly well suited to each other.

The first is the creative mind, obviously. Artists are inherently sensitive and obsessive people. Within those traits, expression can tip into difficult, extreme, and even unhinged behavior. Artistic greatness, after all, can not be easily quantified or measured. Our declaration of witnessing greatness was built exactly on a person exhibiting personality traits like that. This brain needs a kind of privacy to fully flourish. It cannot work while being watched or on a clock. Sometimes, it doesn’t even like it when we ourselves pay too much attention to it (which kinda ties my point up in a bow). It produces the best things precisely when it has forgotten there is anyone to produce them for.

The second is the logical mind, which is fast and strategic and evaluative. It can think about reception, timing, framing, what performs, what lands with an audience, how a creation will be read and received. It's not a lesser mind, per se, and it's a necessary one. This is the mind that pays the rent and we already agreed that was important. But is the opposite of the first in almost every single discernible property.

The push and pull between these two states of mind is the daily reality for an artist in 2026, and it is exhausting to artists in a very, very specific way.

On paper, it may just look like doing two tasks, but it’s not. It is two states of being that actively repel one another, the artist online is asked to switch between them constantly all day, every single day, merely for survival. Make something then market it or create something whilst performing it, and every single time we go through that process of aggressively switching, we are risking our creative health long term, I believe.

I also propose that this is merely the surface and that there is another part which is underneath.

If the two minds only competed for time, we could probably manage that, and it would be something we could rationalise and plan for. We could do the logical work on Mondays and the creative work the rest of the week and keep them apart. But they don’t stay apart, and this is why I think it’s damaging.

The logical mind, once you have lived in it long enough, does not wait politely outside of the studio door. It comes in, and sits down beside you while you try to create, and so you find that even in a supposedly creative moment: the ones that you value, protect, the ones from your soul, are being infused with a part of you that is already planning how this will look, how it will perform, what people will make of it etc.

The future audience is being moved into the creative mind. It’s no longer a case of creation then presentation. We have to fight actively in the moment if we wish to stay purely in creation. I would argue this takes us away from a full state of creativity. The moments are being contaminated and rather strangely, it’s sort of invisible because it can feel just like innocent thinking.

Subscribe now

As I teed this article up, I talked about artistic death happening by a thousand hooks. The reason we are even here, is because of the attention economy. Visibility is a billion dollar industry in its own right, an entire economy that produces nothing but attention and sells it back to us. And we are picking this message up subconsciously all the time that we are logged on and cruising around on social media.

It is in attack on artistic purity and our fight to hold our integrity close to protect it.

It isn’t one single loud betrayal of our true selves. There’s not a day that we decided to sell out, but a slow bleeding of the logical mind into the creative one until you can no longer find the clean, private, unwashed state that you wish to work in.

There’s something else in the picture that I mentioned at the start of this article, and that is the death of artistic mystery.

We used to like not knowing how something was created. Standing in front of a work in the years before every process was filmed, and feeling a sense of wonder in the not knowing. How the colours were formed, how it held together, how someone physically worked on it. You didn’t actually want the answer, and the not knowing was quite a pleasure. It opens space between you and the work, and then your own imagination could walk into that space. It fosters curiosity towards the artist, the maker, the genius. An artist doesn’t deliberately withhold something for you as a pre-planned strategy. The artist leaves room for you to interpret and to feel.

That space is closing rapidly.

When the making of everything artistic is shown in full step by step the finished outcome has nothing left to keep back from you. You’ve already seen how the trick works. And you don’t need to understand something fully, you need to feel surprised delighted. We are trading the mystery for a tutorial, and we are calling it generosity, transparency, even education at best, and we’re receiving it as clickbait at worst. We don’t need something to be the sum of all its parts to be worthy.

It’s one of the oldest pleasures of art.

I also want to finish on the state of creative health, which directly correlates to the points I’m making above.

Creative health is not a wellness luxury and it should not be treated as such. It is an essential state of the human creative mind in order to produce. We talk about protecting our creative energy as though it’s ‘nice to have a bit of self care’ that you get once work has been done, but this is backwards. The creative faculty, the slow and open wandering mind, is an asset of the highest order, especially as we move into the fresh territory that AI in our modern world represents. Our creativity has to be the main event of everything. All the downstream elements rely on this source being healthy and operating. Sales, visibility, (the rent we agreed on), it all depends on that one faculty continuing to function. So when the constant switching degrades its performance, you’re not just tired: something is being eroded while you’re too busy operating to notice. No sane business runs its core machinery into the ground to spend all its time on marketing. Yet precisely, that is what artists are encouraged to do. Sacrifice the health of the making in order to increase the visibility of what is made. Sustaining a career does not primarily mean sustaining your visibility, instead it means sustaining how you work truthfully. Because when that goes, there is no career left to sustain however visible you are.

The reason I think about that sculptor I mentioned at the start is not that I believe that he holds the only correct answer in opting out entirely, or that everyone should copy him. Honestly, most people can’t. The reason that opinion matters is because he proves that this invisible pressure is not the law, is not the only way that art can exist. He demonstrates simply by existing and being comfortable that the apparatus of visibility is optional and that an artist can have a full and serious life in the craft without any of it.

Subscribe now

I reckon once you’ve considered that genuinely as an option, your relationship to it can change even if you continue to pursue visibility. You can stop being pulled, and you can start choosing your own path. You can decide how much of your logical mind you let rule the day and when you defend your creative hours. It’s not as a wish, but as a decision that you’re entitled to make, because you’ve seen with your own eyes that the alternative is very, very real. That’s the difference between being subject to this and being sovereign over it. You don’t have to quit but you know that you could, so everything you do online becomes something that you are choosing rather than something that is being done to you. It’s a protective mechanism of creative health.

If a mind is free, it performs better than a mind that believes it’s being trapped.

So I believe in 2026, maybe we need to think about which of the two minds is running the studio. And whether your machinery is even healthy. Whether you’ve been beaten down into the decisions you are operating with or you are actively choosing them.

Definitely eat food, definitely pay your rent. Show your work if it serves the higher purpose, but guard your slow, open, and private mind as though you’re living dependent on it, because in the end, the only sense that finally matters is that your work works for you.

collage work, 2023

This is not a diagnostic piece or a prescription of anything expressly. I want to go back and discuss a memory of what it used to feel like when I gathered inspiration, before I even knew I was doing it.

I’ve experienced something that is disappearing, and having gone back and looked at this to make this piece, I think it’s now something that I recognise to be coming out in the main discourse around how viewing things online generally can make us feel empty, and what it means to creatives.

This is of course different for everyone, depending on when you were born, what happened to be around you during formative years, and what kind of maker you became.

This is just my story.

Subscribe now

I was born in 1986 and my sister is exactly ten years older. She is the proper artist of the family. She’s detailed, patient, a highly skilled, trained and traditional kind of artist. She studied textiles, fashion and knitwear. She has two degrees and an MA and she has lived her life consistently embedded in surface and material analysis.

Effectively I grew up inside art from the first day with her showing me her way. There were charcoal portraits of me on her bedroom floor. I remember them vividly, I would sit and model for her as she tried to draw me, trying to get me to keep still. Art materials in her bedroom made me drawn to her space and it was ordinary for me. It was all within reach and she’d let me play and experience and experiment. I had a full transferrential art education before I had any words for it, and that was just being in her bedroom.

What I still remember the most, the most visceral memory that I have and the one that my body still holds onto, if I close my eyes I can smell them exactly as they were, in piles taking up huge amounts of space, with their white spines. It was her magazines. Elle and Vogue, she had subscriptions, and she had hundreds of them in her bedroom as a teenager. They were always to hand and I used to go into her bedroom when she was there or not, and I can feel the memory right now of touching them and opening them. This weight of the material sat in the corner, it was available and just asking to be explored.

I could have been five ish, anywhere from five and older, with her being ten years older than me. She collected them religiously. I’d flick through them. I obviously wouldn’t understand anything: not names, or what was good, or if I even liked anything, or if it meant anything. I just turned pages and the images would just be there, static. I wasn’t studying them, of course, but what I think was happening for me was the beginning of my foraging nature as a young creative.

Then came the cutting and sticking. When my sister was finished with a magazine, she’d often give them to me and I would cut it to pieces: the models, the patterns, the textures, because I was being raised by someone whose whole discipline was texture, and so that’s what my eye went to, and my scissors followed as the most basic thing I could participate with.

The number of collages I made as a child genuinely would be off the chart. That was a real education, as it turned out. More than the sitting still and observing her as an artist, more than just looking at images, but taking them apart with my hands and rebuilding them into something that I could see. I can see now that as an eight-year-old with the scissors, that was me becoming a future artist. I’ve never been the kind of maker with a single point of inspirational reference that I would regularly mine, and I would never express that in any of my dialogue around my work over the last six years. Instead, in my subconscious, I’ve always mentioned that I gather fragments from everywhere and let them combine within my act of creation. That’s exactly what scrapbooking was: foraging in a magazine for the parts that caught my eye, with no plan, no name for what I was exactly collecting, just the pull towards this texture here or that pattern there.

With hands, making them into something new.

And hands are actually the topic of this article. Specifically the connection I’ve come to consider while I’ve been putting this piece together. Just through my own experience, and how it’s echoing what is happening around screens, and around the pull back away from ed-tech, as no replacement from brain to hand. If you want to learn something, truly learn something, you have to write it by hand, not type it. Something about the hand moving and the slow act embeds the information in a way typing never will. The hand is doing something, I suppose, that the eyes alone cannot. It’s making something go in deep, and making it remain.

I believe this to be exactly the same when we consider gathering visual inspiration in 2026 and some of the numb and unsatisfying experiences we are having in spaces that ‘should’ be ‘inspirational’. When you hold reference in your hands, the book, the torn bits of magazine that you’re cutting up, and you handle it, the image goes in. The nature of holding something like that is a sensory experience that goes beyond just what your eyes saw. When you flick past thousands of images, even in the name of research, they go to the very surface, but everything around that moment makes it far harder for it to penetrate deeper than that. Think of the thousands of images our brain sees and tosses out as waste, purely by the style that they were shown in, being less full of depth or less full of importance, even full of less meaning.

We are living through, what I believe to be a huge drawback where we are losing traditional ways of researching that we haven’t really been prioritising. Cutting and sticking is an absurd use of time by the current measure of all activities to do in this modern time. But it works. I am the proof. I can remember actual images from these activities at approximately six ish years old, and I can’t remember a video I sent myself yesterday until I go back to it to clarify it.

Subscribe now

It makes me consider that real inspiration, if you are seeking it, must be slowed right down, must be friction heavy, and must be tactile, to fight the realities of our highly tuned brains in the modern day.

Real inspiration, the kind that eventually becomes work that you call on, is in the subconscious, I believe. You gather it slowly, and you handle the material, and then it goes somewhere deeper, below concious awareness. It probably just gets put there gently, combined with everything else that you absorb over years, out of sight, and then eventually it’ll come back up. It’ll be turned into something that you have turned into value but couldn’t be traced to a specific source.

That, for me, is what scrapbooking did. The images went in through my hands and they sank and stayed down and became part of what I’ve been calling on to make ever since. Nothing about the way we are consuming images now, or gathering sources (generally speaking en masse) goes anywhere near that level. It’s all in the conscious, it’s too immediate, surface level. Also the speed of absorption, the volume of absorption, the images never get a chance to sink in. Because there’s so many, we’ve trained ourselves to throw them away far too quickly, to discard each one mentally the instant it appears, because there’s another one right behind it. We’d drown otherwise.

Are we not drowning already?

I don’t really have a solution for the end of this piece. This was a think piece and a storytelling session. I only wanted to point out that I remember the corner of my sister’s room, the way of the magazines and the scissors and the hours that I would spend in there, and what it’s meant to me now. That was proper inspiration, and it was my start. It was happening to me before I even understood. I was eight and I was sat there making these gestures with no intention. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just know I liked it. And that was saved up for nearly thirty years.

For 30 days, I have written about my own work first thing in the morning (give or take a couple of hours, but always before lunch time). It’s either been in the context of my whole practice, a piece I made years ago, what I feel emotionally about it, or its been about a piece of informal artwork I have made that same day. Was I reaching, did I ‘fail’, did it surprise me, how did I feel: just basically whatever came up. I guess the surprise for me is that I barely have time for this right now, I have two kids, we are between lives, moving, travelling, it’s quite chaotic. But the cathartic and healing nature of this discipline has been remarkable. It’s been thirty days of a non sharable, non shiny activity thats has kind of undone me and put me back together in one.

Here is what it has meant to me.

a painting from 2021 that went into a collection in China

1. I suspected I could feel more about my work, and it turns out I could

My work is very….happy (on the surface)…..but that’s not it, at all. My work is about the many themes of joy we can feel in being a human. I am not happy all the time, I am however aware. I am positive, I am looking for goodness all the time in situations, but it’s not because I am happy outright. I am actually quite down at the moment, not in a serious way but in a transitional phase in life that I am embracing with curiosity and being open to the lessons. But in writing about my work it has really shown me how it’s a truly fundamental part of my life. When I am away from it for days/weeks, I don’t notice until it swoops in and I feel horrendously disconnected from myself, my awareness kicks in and I correct. I also feel that when I have gone back through older works, it exposed that making something and understanding it are not the same thing. I was able to honestly and brutally report as a kind of exorcism, how I was feeling at the time, if I was feeling fear or disconnection, what the piece did for me in reality. Some of it I might have been too resistant to even admit to myself in the moment. All in all, I feel like I know my work better.

Subscribe now

2. Slow thoughts, healthier thoughts

Something I have deeply wrangled with, basically the entire time I have been an artist, is the battle to be private and seen at the same time. As one goes on, these layers and layers of understanding yourself, this ever changing landscape of connection to the self through being an artist, through sharing, through exposing what is in your heart: it is a never ending lesson in this balance, in my experience at least. Sometimes the speed of the work I have been undertaking has prevented me from feeling essential things to keep going. Doing something so slow, so insignificant, just for you, it really does allow you to expose truth. Art is so deeply personal for so many people, and I am not exception, just because my work evokes joy, activation and happiness. It is an act that has taken a lot of constant pushing to share and having a very private place to put some of the realities of that has been very healthy.

a painting from 2020

3. The work was an instinctual reconnection to the self, and continues to be

The very first photos I have of my trial paintings, my son was still only one and my daughter two years old. I was doing them in nap time. I went back to some of these and printed them out to put in this diary and it made me quite emotional, it makes me feel it now too even just writing that I go the same tug into the moment. The first act was that joy was coming back into myself, in a first small step. A beginning of reclaiming personal territory after the first intensity of motherhood was under my belt. I never painted in florals, but I was flourishing through this process, the forms and colour choices that I experimented with. My heart and hands knew. The articulation came limping along a lot later when the theme was establishing itself. Writing about it every day has made me catch up, that the practice knows before the practitioner does, which is probably similar for a lot of artists. Writing honestly has closed the gap between the first intentions in 2020, through to now in 2026.

Subscribe now

4. the value is in the doing

Rick Rubin pops up on our feed every third day to tell us this in one of his ever circling clips. It is obvious, but this exercise actually cements it. None of this work needs to be seen to be meaningful. I have sold a lot of work in the last six years and the mechanisms of that create havoc in your reward systems. The humble, boring, unglamorous act of simply caring about something because it is for you in the most non eventful way is beyond healthy and something I now consider to be a downright essential way to survive as an artist. You simply cannot think of everything you create in output as a point of interest, a moment of content and something that needs filming to be valuable.

5. It was essential that it was private in order for it to ‘work’.

The last point on the list is what I felt most. I have journaled for more than 20 years, I have written about the personal ups and downs of life and it has been a great source of support and helped me immeasurably. But I have never purely written about my art exclusively, so this exercise was truly brand new.

It is my opinion that artists are in dangerous waters with over sharing. Avoiding the shadow-thoughts that attach themselves to working: where will this go, who will see it, how will it read, is it worth posting. Being blunt, there are artists in the top 0.5% realm who never have to consider this. Then there is everyone else. But, many artists wont reach their potential if they succumb to this mindset (another essay, I feel) but you get the idea and you see it, feel it, know it. We all do.

This exercise had none of that, structurally, because it was private. It’s really, objectively, complete nonsense, but it’s absolutely priceless. Doing work that no one sees is freeing, it’s without pressure. If I could summarise the feeling in a couple of words it would be peaceful and empty. It has been like a training camp, a lesson in un-optimisation. The private relationship to the creative self has to be maintained as one of the highest quality relationship in your life in order to last the test of time. If there are cracks, and holes, and short cuts: it is compromised. But modern life is trying to encourage us to drown it all out and just share share share.

Would you do this? Could you see the benefit? Only for you and for no one else. Maybe not even 30 days. One week? Or just do it tonight with one piece of work. Three honest sentences is a start.

Your artists journey is holding lessons that can still be hidden from you, until you slow down enough to hear them.

The hierarchy that puts painting above textiles, and “fine art” above “applied art,” hardened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was aggressively enforced through the twentieth.

Before that, and in many artistic traditions outside Western academies, the boundaries were far more permeable. Artists made altarpieces and banners and furniture and tapestries and none of it expressly required a separate identity.

And the artists most damaged by the hierarchy were disproportionately women, because the media that got demoted: textile, ceramic, decorative, domestic interior, were the ones women had access to. The demotion wasn’t primarily aesthetic, rather it was social, institutional and economic. And then it got rehashed as taste.

So my findings support that a multidisciplinary practice isn’t eccentric or unfocused. It’s perfectly acceptable and dates through history.

So here is the evidence I have found.

Subscribe now

Sonia Delaunay made a patchwork cover for her newborn son Charles in 1911, out of scraps, in the manner of the Eastern European peasant work she’d grown up around. When it was finished, she said that the arrangement of the pieces seemed to evoke Cubist conceptions, and they then tried applying the same process to other objects and to paintings. That blanket is now generally understood as the pivot in her work from figuration to abstraction, and helped shape the experiments that became Simultanism, including Robert’s Simultaneous Windows.

And that all started with ‘just’ a cot blanket, essentially.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp ran the textile design department at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts from 1916 to 1929, a department she helped found. Her Vertical-Horizontal series was built directly on the grid structures of textiles. The abstraction didn’t happen alongside the weaving, it came out of it. She was painting, sculpting, designing furniture, making marionettes, dancing at the Cabaret Voltaire, and keeping her Dada involvement quiet so she wouldn’t lose the teaching job, because civil servants were expected to appear respectable.

Ruth Asawa encountered a looped-wire technique in Mexico in 1947 and spent the rest of her life making sculpture out of it. Critics couldn’t place it. Wire was a craft material, the forms looked like baskets, and she was raising six children in San Francisco, so for years critics often reduced her to a housewife making decorative wire objects.. Her work is now held by many of America’s major museums.

Louise Bourgeois grew up in her family’s tapestry restoration workshop outside Paris, helping from around twelve by drawing in the missing sections that needed repair. She spent sixty years making sculpture and then, in her eighties, cut up the clothes, tablecloths, bed linen and more that she’d hoarded her whole life and made them into work. She linked sewing explicitly to repair, to fixing damage.

That’s just four women working with materials that had been marked as less worthy and less deserving of a title of art. Yet they are four stories and four bodies of work that changed what came after them.

What it cost them:

Let’s look at the pattern of dismissal, shall we?

Delaunay spent decades known as the decorative one while Robert was the serious one. In 1978, the year before she died at ninety-three, she set out what people had called her over the course of her life. Muse of Orphism. Decorator. Robert Delaunay’s partner then finally, collaborator. She was then the continuer, and only after all of that she said, did they admit the work existed in its own right.

Taeuber-Arp died in 1943 of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty stove. The Zurich police report described her occupation as housewife. Of course she was a painter, sculptor, textile designer, furniture designer, interior designer, architect, dancer, head of a university department.

But yes she was a housewife.

She went onto the Swiss fifty-franc note in 1995, the only woman in that series of banknotes, fifty-two years after the police report.

Bourgeois had her first major retrospective at MoMA in 1982, in her seventies. It was the first the museum had given a woman. She’d been working since the forties.

Asawa was dismissed as a San Francisco housewife by some critics who couldn’t decide whether wire was art.

Subscribe now

What am I taking from this:

It isn’t a straightforward story about women being overlooked.

Two of these women describe the low-status medium as the thing that gave them room.

Delaunay’s blanket could be radically abstract precisely because it was a blanket. The category carried fewer institutional expectations. There were no officials watching a mother sew a cot cover or critics assessing whether it advanced the discourse. The stakes were low, so the experiment was given freedom and turned out to be one of the more significant developments in European abstraction during that decade.

Taeuber-Arp found the applied arts more accepting of abstraction than fine art was. She could make radically geometric work in textile and exhibit it in a historical moment when the same forms in oil paint would have been a fight.

So the hierarchy did two things at once. It suppressed them but it also sheltered them.

Somewhat of a cage and also a laboratory.

We can take that as clarifying rather than depressing then, in some ways. It means the demoted mediums weren’t an outright compromise these women settled for, but instead they were in some cases, the only place that a new thing could actually be made.

Here is some of my work now ranging from textiles, to collage to wall sculpture, tufting, etc etc etc the list goes on. One image there is of me sat on a footstool made from a handmade textile, and also the textile itself on the studio floor.

What does this lineage mean to me on any given day..

This matters to me enormously, it has mattered when my curiosities about my forms insisting on becoming wood. Or what my paintings would look like in wool and made into furniture. These materials ask different questions, and each solves problems the others can’t. My job is simply to follow them, to see them through and have belief in my problem solving. Sometimes (more often than I would like to admit) I am filled with doubt, the low background suspicion that a serious artist would have picked one by now, that the range was evidence of not having committed enough. These stories help me keep my eye on the far off distant horizon of my own timeline that this doesn’t need to resolve right now or only in painting. Just because of the illusion that others who do the same have resolved their pursuits quicker.

In my world, mediums feed each other.

Taeuber-Arp’s textile grid became her painting structure. Delaunay’s patchwork logic became a theory of colour that ran through paintings, dresses, book bindings. Asawa took a technique for making containers and used it to make drawings that occupied space. Bourgeois spent sixty years in bronze and marble and latex and then found that she also had things to say in her own worn-out clothes.

They too were evidently following problems into whichever medium they felt at the time would find their resolve in.

That’s the argument for a multi-disciplinary practice, and it isn’t about range or restlessness or being unable to settle. It’s that some problems are only solvable in one material, and you don’t know which material until you’ve tried or asked yourself, do I have more in me?

Finding these women’s stories helps to dissolve that, and it was through evidence of their endurance, not just a comforting anecdote.

The lineage I recognise is one of makers who worked across whatever material held the idea, without requiring a separate identity for each.

So this isn’t a defence. There’s nothing to defend. It’s just that I didn’t know the depths of some of my artistic ancestors, and now I do, and it turns out they were they were wrestling with many of the same questions., in worse conditions, and getting called housewives for it.

Subscribe now

I shared an image of the book in question the other day, having previously shared a short vid about it on THE OTHER PLATFORM. Deeply insufficient and lacking substance as is always the way over there.

So I wanted to do more.

I love this story, I love this book and I believe there are many lessons in here to learn, as women, as artists and creatives living in this moment in 2026.

The artist in question Mary Delany. At forty she was a widow with no children, she had no profession or recognition, nothing that anyone could have gestured at and called a life of accomplishments. Fifteen years earlier she had a marriage that ended, the man simply died and left her to reclaim all her time as her own again. She had skills, that’s for sure, and that was all she had in addition to the small fact (important for my point of this essay), that nobody at all was watching her acquire them.

She was by every visible available measure, a woman whose life had not happened.

So, at seventy-two, she begun a journey towards creating nine hundred and eighty-five paper flowers that were botanically exact and cut freehand. Some of them built from two hundred separate pieces of paper laid one over another until the depiction of the flower looked like it breathed air, and they sit in the British Museum today. The story gets told as a miracle of late blooming, an old woman rising up out of her grief with a pair of scissors in her hand, and I understand why it gets told that way, because I guess it’s a lovely story and we are hungry for these.

But it isn’t the only thing that happened. Instead what happened is that she spent sixty years quietly getting ready without ever knowing that would be what she was destined to be doing, and then one afternoon in an ordinary room, she was ready.

Subscribe now

I keep thinking about what those sixty years actually looked like from the inside, because from there, from her perspective, they cannot possibly have looked like a prelude to anything. They probably looked like a very normal Tuesday, and then another perfectly normal Saturday.

She embroidered, she did shellwork and plasterwork and silhouettes, she drew and she painted, she wrote thousands upon thousands of letters, she studied botany in the years when botany was still becoming a thing in itself. She spent long slow summers at Bulstrode in a house full of botanists and specimens and drawings, with a garden and an aviary and a zoo, where she did the things she had always done, which was look very carefully at what was in front of her, for years and years, while nobody noticed it at all.

And every one of those apparently pointless accomplishments turned out, in the end, to be a component. The embroidery had taught her how a petal sits against another petal, because she had spent decades stitching them. The shellwork had taught her that hundreds of small fragments can be assembled into one convincing whole, which is exactly and precisely what a paper collage is. In her Irish estate with her next husband, Patrick, she painted the walls of the chapel, just a wife decorating a room, nothing more. And in the doing of it she came to understand how to handle colour, and thirty years later she would colour her own papers.

None of it was preparation because she wasn’t knowingly doing so. She was simply just living her life.

Subscribe now

Right now in 2026, I believe we have encouraged a culture in society, interwoven with such emphasis placed on being seen to be doing, whereby those sixty years that Mary existed would be viewed as unbearable in the present day. And I don’t mean difficult, I mean genuinely unbearable. We have made visibility the proof of existence, and that quiet years that produce nothing visible at all, will feel like failure while you are living through them. Every month you spend actually learning something is a month you are not posting about learning it (although now that is shared too). Every skill you pick up slowly, badly, privately, over years, is a skill that does not exist as far as the route to market/the feed/exposure is concerned.

So on balance ‘we’ don’t stay in things. We cannot tolerate the part where we are not good yet and nobody knows, so we leave it alone and go and consume something instead, because consuming feels like progress, it also costs nothing and delivers more or less the same chemical without the small ongoing humiliation of being a beginner.

Delany’s advantage, and it was an enormous one, was that she worked in absolute silence. She had no way at all to broadcast those sixty years, so she could never be talked out of them by their invisibility, and the complete absence of an audience meant there was no audience to tell her she was behind.

We don’t have that for even a single hour and we are the first generation to experience this deeply problematic culture. Every quiet stretch now arrives with a running commentary of everyone else’s loud one. Internal peace, intuition and desire to try in silence can get muffled out to the extreme noise of the dialogue of others. And the byproduct of that is feeling like a failure before you even start. Scrolling is so undramatic which is why it’s a problem. It is a drift, a slip, a slope a flow into wasted time and potential.

What do we actually risk by not staying in something?

Initially it’s invisible. You skip an afternoon, watch stuff instead of making stuff. Nobody anywhere is worse off and the world is exactly as it was.

But run that for a decade and you have a person who has consumed enormously and assembled nothing, and they are not talentless and they are not lazy, they were simply never in one place long enough for anything to compound, all that attention paid out year after year and none of it accumulating anywhere.

Unless you stay awake and aware, there is a real risk that you’ll never even notice your desires, your wishes and possibilities. There could be a moment where the other version of you turns up to tell you what you would have been if you had stayed with your curiosity longer. But unbuilt capacity leaves no evidence behind it, no absence anyone could point to because it simply isn’t there. So, on the afternoon the geranium appeared on the table for Mary, the parallel universe version of you who is Mary (indulge me) doesn’t see the geranium, because seeing it was the very thing the sixty years would have taught you.

What to do?

In her 40’s, if Delany was already carrying everything she would ever need and simply had no idea, then the question changes shape completely, in my humble view. It stops being ‘am I too late’, and becomes ‘am I awake’.

And that one is answerable today, this afternoon, or even right this very god damn second. It is the only part of any of this that is genuinely in ones hand.

You cannot make the recognition come, you cannot make the moment arrive or make anyone look or make the years move faster. You can only be the person who has stayed curious long enough that when ‘it’ does arrive, you are able to meet it. Which is not a mystical position, whatever it sounds like. It’s a boring Tuesday afternoon position. It’s simply, what did I do with the hours.

Subscribe now

Nine hundred and eighty-five works over ten years is about two a week.

That is the real number, and it is the one nobody ever quotes, because two a week isn’t a miracle, it’s a Wednesday and a Saturday. The total is only astonishing from a distance, and up close she was just cutting up some paper again, the way she had last week, the way she would next week.

And she labelled every single one of them, the Linnaean name and the common name, and on the back the date and the place and the name of whoever had sent the specimen, and her monogram in the corner, cut from paper, MD. Nobody had asked her to. There was no museum waiting, no catalogue, no institution anywhere requiring provenance, just a private old woman in a friend’s house treating her own entirely unwitnessed work as though it were worth the record.

Act as though it matters, before anyone has told you that it does, and not because it will pay off, Mary certainly had no earthly reason to think it would.

The quiet years are not the wait but instead they are the material. Every hour that produces nothing, every skill picked up for no reason at all, every technique learned for a job that goes nowhere and every year that from the outside looks exactly like standing still, is a piece of paper being coloured for a flower you cannot yet imagine.

She arrived at seventy-two carrying sixty years of looking, and it came up all at once, in a room, on an ordinary afternoon, and it looked like luck I guess.

But we know it wasn’t luck. It was Tuesdays and Saturdays.

You might note my previous article where I have declared my mornings as my own again after many months of movement and travel. This article contains all the context you need as to why I am channeling a bit of this energy moving forward through all the chaos of my life right now.

Thanks for reading and thanks to Mary and Molly Peacock for this awesome book!

Seven months ago my husband, our two children and I packed up our life in London and left to travel the world, educating the children through a mixture of homeschooling and world schooling. If you’d asked me at any point during those seven months whether it had been the right decision, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second in saying yes. It’s still how I feel.

It’s been everything we’d hoped it would be. Watching the children adapt has been extraordinary. They’ve become more confident, curious, adaptable, and we’ve had the kind of uninterrupted family time that most people only ever imagine having. We are truly blessed. We’ve watched them discover new cultures, make new friends and develop a confidence that I don’t think would have happened in quite the same way if we’d stayed where we were, and I honestly wouldn’t change that experience for anything.

But, (it was coming) somewhere over the last few weeks I’ve truly realised that while I’ve spent so much time noticing how much they’ve changed, I haven’t really slowed down enough to notice how much I’ve changed too, and the effect it’s had on my artistic practice.

Subscribe

Before this chapter began I worked full-time as an artist, and my days revolved around making. I had a studio, a rhythm, exhibitions to work towards and long stretches of uninterrupted time where my practice wasn’t something I tried to squeeze in around everything else, it was the centre that everything else worked around.

Travelling doesn’t really allow for that because you’re constantly adapting to new places, different routines, changing accommodation, unfamiliar environments and the beautifully unpredictable rhythm of family life. What was once a habit and a deeply rhythmic pattern of creation takes conscious effort to replicate, and it’s still basically impossible

I’ve also tapped back into something that I remember living in real time when my children were younger, but have only really understood now that I have enough distance to look back on it that it is offering a beautiful full circle moment of reflection and learning.

As a woman, and especially as a woman whose work depends on creating, there is a pull that feels almost impossible to explain unless you’ve experienced it yourself. It’s the constant negotiation between duty and self. Between looking after everyone around you and remembering that there is also another part of you that needs protecting

I’ve found that the strange thing is that you can be doing absolutely everything right. You can be fully present with your children, creating a beautiful family life, showing up every day, hitting every mark you’ve set yourself and genuinely loving the life you’ve built, and still find yourself carrying this feeling that somehow you’ve let yourself down. I don’t think it’s because anyone else expects more from you, but rather it’s because somewhere inside you these subconscious lessons we all absorb, all the ‘should’s’ are quietly doing a number in our brain about what it is meant to look and feel like.

I remember living in that space so vividly when my children were little. I was reading books and listening to conversations about the impossible balance between motherhood and creativity, while at the very same time living that exact tension every single day. I remember the internal judgement far more than any judgement from other people. It wasn’t society making me question whether my work mattered, it was me. I constantly felt the pull between doing what I believed was my duty and protecting the part of me that desperately needed to make things, and for a long time I believed those two things were somehow in conflict.

It took years to unlearn that.

I spent a long time convincing myself that making art wasn’t something I earned once everything else was finished, because of course nothing is ever really finished when you have children. I had to learn that protecting creative time wasn’t selfish, it wasn’t indulgent and it certainly wasn’t taking anything away from my family. If anything, it made me more myself within my family. It was a hard, hard lesson to sell to myself and to embody fully.

Eventually that became second nature. I stopped apologising, I built a practice that felt solid, and I no longer questioned whether my work deserved protecting because I knew that it did and my career took off.

Subscribe

What surprised me was how quietly seven months of constant movement began to unravel those habits. I know my work matters, and how much I need it to live happily, but when life becomes beautifully fluid and unstructured, your own needs are often the easiest thing to move, postpone or set aside.

I don’t actually think that’s unique to me. I think women become incredibly skilled at adapting, so skilled in fact that we sometimes stop noticing what we’re adapting away from, and by the time we do notice it, we’ve convinced ourselves it happened naturally.

The other thing this journey has exposed is something I don’t think I would have discovered if we’d stayed at home. I’ve realised there’s a certain safety in the ‘doing’, for me at least. Give me a job, a deadline or a problem to solve, and I’ll throw myself at it with everything I’ve got. That’s always been my default setting. I don’t tend to procrastinate, I don’t spend weeks wondering whether to begin and, if something needs doing, I’ll usually give it 110% without thinking twice.

Action has always been my comfort zone, whereas travel quietly took away the constant stream of obvious things to do. It removed the structure that had always existed around me, and in the space that was left behind I found myself with something I hadn’t experienced for a very long time.

Time itself. Not studio time (I don’t have one). Just time on my hands without structure or direction. Dang…it’s been revealing.

It’s exposed what I naturally reach for when nobody is asking anything of me. How I spend an empty morning and whether I choose to begin making something, or whether I fill that space by reading, researching, listening, watching or looking for inspiration somewhere outside of myself. This element is suchhhhh a tight rope, I have loved the opportunity to read, but to every yin must be a yang, and when they go out of balance, boy oh boy do you get signals.

I’ve realised I’ve been putting far too much time between the thinking and the doing. A lot of that has simply been circumstance. We’ve been moving countries, living out of suitcases, creating a completely different life and adapting almost weekly. It would be unrealistic to expect my creative rhythm to remain exactly the same through all of that.

But even so, it’s been illuminating. Ideas don’t become stronger simply because they’re left sitting in your head for longer. Creativity doesn’t grow in the gap between thinking and doing, I know from experience it grows when thinking becomes doing.

I genuinely don’t believe there’s such a thing as a bad situation when your goal is experience. Every season teaches you something if you’re paying attention, and this one has been an absolute treasure trove of learning. It hasn’t shown me that I lost my creativity but it’s shown how easy it is to feel disconnected from it

Somewhere during these seven months I started consuming more than I was creating, and I don’t think I realised how significant the effects of that could be until these feelings have been maturing properly. Despite journaling as I always do, things take time to present properly.

I’m still as ambitious as ever, still disciplined, but consumption has an incredible way of disguising itself as creative work. Reading articles feels productive, same as watching interviews feels productive, saving references feels productive. Even researching ideas feels productive, and before long it’s possible to spend an entire morning thinking about creativity without actually creating anything at all.

I honestly think this is becoming one of the biggest challenges for artists today, because we’re surrounded by an endless supply of brilliant ideas, beautiful work and inspiring people, but creativity depends on space and silence.

That’s really what this experiment is about. It’s not just about creativity, it’s about my mind, my body and my soul, because I know they’re all connected and they all need protecting in equal measure.

Every morning for the next 40 days I’ll begin in exactly the same way. I’ll move my body with some form of exercise, I’ll journal, and I’ll draw. These are all things I do all the time, but not in this new way with devotion and protection, currently. Nothing elaborate or with an outcome attached to it and nothing that needs to be shared, just three small rituals that belong entirely to me before the rest of the world gets any of my attention.

Only after those three things are done will I allow any external input. No social media, podcasts, no emails and no looking at anything, because I want to find out what really happens when my own thoughts get the first part of the day instead of the last.

The number 40 feels important too because today I turn 40, and this experiment will last for exactly 40 days.

I’ve started imagining each day as if it represents one year of my life. Day one is one year old, day twenty is twenty years old and day forty is the person I am today. Every morning I’ll be showing up for one year of my life, not just the woman turning 40 but the little girl who loved making things, the young artist trying to convince herself that her work mattered, the mother learning how to protect her creativity alongside raising children, and finally, the woman I am today who understands that creating isn’t something she does once everything else is finished, it’s part of who she is no matter what is going on

Rather than celebrating turning 40 with one day, I am honouring it over forty, one little morning at a time.

I’ll document it honestly because I genuinely don’t know what will happen, but I have a feeling that somewhere over these next forty mornings I will get something back.

Light in August is gold and impatient and in the house of yellow, flowers are already dying. He does know this in the back of his mind and has been thinking it since he cut them, they don’t exactly wait for anyone. Seasons have taught him how heads go heavy, through the morning and into the afternoon, petals curling and going brown, their glory escaping. The furious yellow is a sight to catch in a matter of hours and not days.

He has set them in the earthenware vase on the small table. He has mixed the yellows, three of them, yellow on yellow on yellow. He lifts the brush, and the phone buzzes on the table.

He doesn’t mean to look, obvs. He means to leave it. But the buzz sits there in the corner of the room like a second person breathing, and his eye goes to it the way an eye goes to a moving thing, and it’s a comment, someone has said something under the self-portrait he posted on Thursday, and the something is not kind. He reads it twice, puts the brush down to type, just a short reply, just to set it right, and the typing takes him into the scroll and the scroll takes him somewhere else entirely.

There is a painter in Paris whose work is doing well, you can see it doing well, the numbers sit under it like applause. Vincent looks and a cold drop comes into his chest, the small familiar plummet, and he thinks the thought that the machine is built to make him think, which is that he is behind. That he is doing it wrong. That yellow on yellow is indulgent, illegible, a dead end, that nobody stops for still life any more, that he should be making other things, the things that travel, that gets the applause and numbers. He should post more, and differently, too. He should be more visible or none of this means anything, the painting least of all.

The light moves across the wall.

The light is merciless, it doesn’t buzz or announce itself. It simply crosses the room while he is looking down, sliding off the petals it came to illuminate, and the flowers go on doing the only thing flowers do, which is change. A petal lets go of the third bloom and lands on the table without a sound, but he does not see it, he is watching a stranger’s work bloom under his thumb while his own wilts three feet away, unwatched and unpainted.

By the time he sits back down the morning is gone and the best of the light with it. The flowers have turned so he tells himself tomorrow, he will cut fresh ones. Then tomorrow the phone buzzes again. Another comment, another painter. There is always a reason the painting can wait, and the flowers (who cannot wait) are the ones who pay.

He never paints the sunflowers that season.

Not these ones, not the next ones. The canvas stays white. The week that in another life would have given the world four of its most reproduced images gives it instead, a slightly larger following and a man who feels that by evening he is vaguely and continuously behind. He dies as he was always going to die, except this time he leaves no yellow behind him.

Subscribe now

So I made you sit through that because I think it is happening, not to Vincent who got his miracle, who happened to live and die in a century that left him gloriously and tragically alone with his work. I think it’s happening now, to people alive today, in numbers we will never be able to count.

It is happening to all of us as we navigate the treacherous waters of art/commercial success/visibility and sanity.

We have been handed an idea and we swallowed it whole, and seemingly everyone around you already believes it. The idea is that visibility is the most essential thing an artist can pursue. That the work is not enough. That you must build the audience, feed the platform, master the algorithm, show the face, share the process, be discoverable or be nothing. And the cruelty of it is that some of it is true. The galleries are closing, the old doors are shut/shutting.

We do need to be seen, obviously. But look at the downstream of it and look at what it does to a generation of makers when every incentive around them points away from the craft and toward the performance of it, when the reward arrives for the posting and not the painting. When the dopamine comes from the comment and not the canvas. You get artists who are superb at being seen and quietly worse at the work itself. You get people who can grow an account and can no longer sit in a silent room for six hours concentrating on…well…anything at all. You get a thousand Vincents with white canvases and healthy follower counts feeling vaguely behind and you get a world with less art in it, real art, the kind that costs the maker their whole attention and no way to ever tally what’s missing.

Vincent’s devotion was only possible because nobody was watching which is the unbearable irony. He had no audience to please, so no audience could pull him off course, no numbers to externally validate him. The total absence of visibility, the thing that broke his heart, may have been the exact condition that let him paint like that by being undistracted, racing the light, painting for the flowers and for Theo and for the thing in him that had to come out. He got to be undistracted in a way that is now almost impossible to be.

So here is the only instruction I have, for myself as much as you. Protect the hours of silence, work unwitnessed, unrewarded hours where magic happens, the ones that don’t trend, the ones nobody claps for. Guard them the way Vincent guarded his mornings, racing the light before the flowers were gone.

What are your sunflowers, the work you’d make if no one was watching? And what is the buzzing thing that keeps pulling you out of the room?

I’m not focusing the grand theory of how the art world should be reinvented. I’m thinking in terms of the things that could change on a random Tuesday if just some people with some power in their hands (at all levels), decided they had enough of participating in the current system as is. Here are twenty of them. For galleries, institutions, some for platforms, and even us, the artists, because we are not always innocent in this either. Ideas for absolutely every single level of the industry from blue-chip to newbie.

1. End pay-to-play applications, or at least be absolutely honest about them.

The model whereby artists are charged a fee to apply for a show or a residency or a prize is open to so much exploitation it’s untrue. Money flows from the people with (generally) the least to the people with the most, and the artist gets a maybe. After the Abstract Mag/Summer Residency situation of recent weeks, the whole thing feels shadier than ever. Of course yes, people need to be paid for what they do/services they offer. If you charge a fee, show everyone exactly where it goes with a crystal clear breakdown. How much came in, how many applied, what the money paid for. If its all good, there is nothing to hide, right?

2. No ghosting. Ever.
Doesn’t matter if it’s the most exclusive gallery in the world or someone messaging about which pastels you recommend. Ghosting is bad for the entire industry, not just the person ghosted. For the ‘ghoster’ it makes you dismissive of people, even if you don’t register it as hurtful, it potentially is and over time that isn’t good internally, or maybe even for your cosmic karma. And for the ‘ghostee’, it causes a potential array of negative reflections that makes people want to give up before they’ve started. If you work for an organisation, getting back to people should be trained into you like a reflex. You’re meant to be here for the cause, for art and not just your own game. Reply to people, it costs almost nothing and it makes people feel seen.

3. Transparent pricing, publicly.
Hiding the price of work behind “enquire for details” mostly serves galleries, and those systems are crumbling around us anyway. Art pricing is one of the most deliberately unregulated and unsubstantiated markets on the planet. Multiple art narrators/curators/faces online have recently said of Basel and other fairs, prices were being voluntarily offered and the vibe was friendly, which was actually quite creepy (lol). Someone described it as too little, too late given the landscape of what is going on wholesale, and I get that entirely. I could make this point a lot longer and more nuanced but maybe for another time.

4. Pay artists for exhibiting, not just for selling.
Exhibition fees are standard in some countries and a fantasy in most. Showing work has real costs for the artist, time, framing, transport, and “exposure” doesn’t pay rent. It’s just another way/idea to give artists value as they are majorly undervalued in society, full stop.

5. Kill the unpaid “opportunity.”
The group show that costs you to hang in. The feature that wants free work for visibility. The collab that’s all upside for the brand. Name these honestly. Some are fine, but most are extraction dressed as an unsubstantiated watery opportunity.

6. Contracts for everything, even the small stuff.
A one-page agreement on what happens to the work, who insures it, when you get paid, what the commission is. Artists get burned constantly because the deal lived in a DM and then the XYZ happened. Normalise the boring paperwork, because it protects the person with the least power, which is usually always the artist.

7. Clear, fast payment terms.
When a piece sells, the artist should know exactly when they’ll be paid and it should be a sensible amount of short weeks, not months and not the rest of the year. Galleries sitting on artists’ money for months is common and quietly devastating for people living close to the line.

8. Stop gatekeeping the basic information.
How do you actually get a show. How are prizes really judged. What does a gallery take. The withholding of plain industry information keeps outsiders out and protects no one but the insiders. Tell people how it works.

9. Think creatively about how you bring people ‘in’.
It’s a simple one. The art world is incredibly clicky and exclusive and sometimes feels impossible. Ideas for creativity: go into small town art colleges and offer access to students for openings/big calendar events for free, so they can feel it.

10. Judge prizes and open calls blind where you can.
So much selection runs on who you already know and who you’ve already seen. Anonymise the work at first pass. Let the work get through the door before the name does.

11. Support artists who aren’t in the big cities.
Opportunity clusters in a handful of postcodes and everyone else is told to move or miss out. Fund and show regional artists where they actually are. Talent isn’t concentrated in the capital.

12. Stop fetishising youth.
The “30 under 30,” the emerging-artist machinery, the implication that if you didn’t make it by a certain age you missed it (social media bs). People come to their work at every age. Late starters, career-changers, parents who paused. Build space for them instead of writing them off.

13. Platforms should stop punishing artists for posting art.
The algorithm buries the painting and rewards the talking-head video about the painting. Artists are being trained by the platforms to make content instead of work. If you run a platform and you care about culture, stop throttling the actual thing that gave you a name in the first place.

14. Credit and pay for the labour behind the artist.
The studio assistants, the technicians, the framers, the installers, the people who make the show physically happen. They’re often invisible and underpaid. Name them. Pay them properly. The art world runs on their hands too.

Subscribe now

15. Be honest in rejections, even briefly.
You can’t give everyone feedback, but a rejection that says “not this time, please apply again” reads completely differently from silence. One sentence of humanity. People build their year around these decisions.

16. Stop treating mental health as the artist’s private problem.
The instability, the rejection cycle, the money stress, the comparison machine, these are structural, not personal failings. Institutions that profit from artists could fund actual support instead of romanticising the suffering after the artist is in trouble. We are one big breathing ecosystem, the whole thing needs to be healthy.

17. Make residencies cover the basics.
A residency that doesn’t cover travel, materials, and some kind of stipend is only open to people who already have money. Which means residencies quietly select for wealth and call it talent. Fund the basics or admit who you’re really for.

18. Resale royalties that actually reach the artist.
When work resells for many times the original price, the artist who made it usually sees none of it. Where royalty schemes exist, make them work and make them paid. The value came from the artist and some of it should go back.

19. Artists, support other artists out loud.
This one’s on us. Buy each other’s work when you can. Share it without being asked. Recommend people for things. The scarcity mindset where we treat every other artist as competition is exactly what the system wants from us. Generosity between artists is the one structure we can build ourselves, today, for free.

20. Remember the art is the point.
Not the market, the brand, the follower count, the opening-night photos. All of the above only matters because somewhere a person made something true. Every decision in this industry should be able to answer one question: does this help more real art get made and reach people. If it doesn’t, what is the reason?

That’s just the list I thought of over the last week writing this.

Which of these would change tomorrow? And what’s the one you’d add at number 21?

Let me tell you where it comes from.

The word is Aristotle’s, more or less. Around 340 BC he sat down to answer the question every human eventually asks, which is simply: how do I live well. His answer was eudaimonia. It gets translated as happiness, but that translation has done real damage, because we hear happiness and think of a mood or a good day, a pleasant feeling that comes and goes. Aristotle meant almost the opposite of a passing feeling, he meant a whole life lived well and a whole way of being. Flourishing, in the sense a plant flourishes, by becoming fully what it is.

Subscribe now

When I understood it and fully arrived at the word, I begun to use it in my artist statement because it felt so accurate for my personal artistic vision. For Aristotle, eudaimonia was not a state you arrive at but rather it was an activity. He drew a hard line between two Greek words, hexis and energeia. Hexis is a state, something you have, a thing you possess. Energeia is an activity, something you are doing or a thing you are actually engaged in. And his whole point, the thing he hammers in the Ethics, is that flourishing belongs to the second category, not the first.

He put it plainly. Eudaimonia, he wrote, is “activity of soul in accordance with virtue.” Activity, and not a quality you own. Not a certificate you earn and hang on the wall. A person who has courage but never acts on it is not flourishing, he says. The courage has to be exercised. It has to be done. The flourishing is in the doing or it is nowhere to be seen.

For a long time, and I think circumstantially I found it hard to really talk about my work. People saw it and took it for what it was and were not that curious about what lay beneath the surface. Another risky move of being in the attention economy that we inhabit as artists. I wasn’t blissfully happy painting bright colours, but rather I was so happy to be doing and feeling filled up by that. Also, the paintings were happy, despite anything I felt. I noticed it was my resistance. Any artist doing instead of just thinking is living by this principle.

We treat art as a noun, it’s a painting or an object. The thing that hangs on the wall and gets valued and sold and looked at. We treat the artwork as the point and the making of it as the means to that point, the labour you do to produce the valuable object at the end. Aristotle’s framework flips this completely. If flourishing lives in the activity and not the state, then the making is not the means to the art but instead the making is the art. The energeia, the doing, the act of a particular human exercising their full faculties at the edge of what they’re capable of, that is the thing itself. The object left behind is the beautiful residue of that.

Subscribe now

This is why I keep saying being an artist is an act and not a thought. You don’t flourish by thinking about making or having ideas, or by being the kind of person who could make things, or by possessing taste and talent in some latent unused form. None of that is energeia. All of it is just hexis, potential sitting in a drawer.

You flourish in the doing, by the hand moving, the decision being made and the material resisting and you answering it. The whole of the good life, in Aristotle’s account, is in the active exercise of what makes you most fully human. And for some of us, the thing that makes us most fully human, the faculty crying out to be exercised is in the making of things.

So when the culture treats art as a luxury or merely a decoration, a nice-to-have we can defund and dismiss and tell our children to avoid, it is making a category error that is two and a half thousand years old by making the end point the thing that holds highest value. I have also experienced that deeply this year as I have voluntarily not sold a single art work for the entire year of 2026 (I’ll share more on that another day) but everything I make still holds enormous value within this framework.

That framing looks at the object and asks what it’s worth, and never sees the only thing that ever mattered, which was a human being in the full activity of their soul, flourishing, doing the one thing that makes them most alive.

That is what my work is about. Not the surfaces but of course I do care about the surfaces. Not the objects, though I make them as well as I can. Underneath all of it, the work is about the act of making as the highest form of being alive. Every piece is a record of a person flourishing, in Aristotle’s exact sense, doing the thing they were most fully made to do.

Joy (which I bang on about all the time) isn’t separate from this. We tend to file joy as the soft stuff and the feeling you get when things go well as some kind of reward. But in this older and truer frame, joy is the felt signature of flourishing. It’s what the activity of the soul feels like from the inside when you’re doing it well. The joy in the studio isn’t a bonus on top of the work. It’s the evidence that the work is doing what work is for. It’s eudaimonia, reporting in.

I don’t make things to have made them. I make things because the making is the living, and I would rather be alive than have a drawer full of proof that I once could have been.

What’s the activity that makes you most feel like this? And are you doing it, or just holding it as something you could do?

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

And I don’t honestly think we can imagine what it will feel like yet. We’re standing at the very start of it with the tools being maybe two/three years away from being in the hands of the actual masses. Let’s just remind ourselves where we actually are right now in terms of adoption with this brilliant illustration from Damien Player.

Also, it still isn’t that easy yet, it is easy ish but it isn’t entirely a piece of cake, yet.

We have no idea in our brains and bodies what it’s going to be like when the flood actually arrives. Right now it still feels novel/a bit fun/a bit alarming, but still somewhere over there. Ask me again when every surface you look at is generated, when the feed is bottomless and seamless and none of it was made by anyone. We haven’t lived through that yet but we sure as hell are about to.

Two things:

The first: we have no idea yet how valuable taste is about to become in this picture I am describing. When making something is hard, taste is almost invisible, folded into the craft, hard to separate from skill. When making becomes effortless and infinite, taste is suddenly the only thing left that’s scarce.

The ability to look at a thousand options and know which one is right, when to cut stuff and to leave things out. To say no, that’s not right. Yes, that’s the one. In a world where anyone can generate anything, the whole game becomes knowing what’s worth keeping. That’s taste. It doesn’t get cheaper in the flood. It becomes the most indispensable thing available, and only if you have it to start with.

The second:

People/humans will start to absorb the taste of machines, if they don’t do the work and look in other, better, deeper and harder to source places. Because it will be making beautiful things, people will look. And I know, for certain, it will. Outputs can be pleasing, but that's taste as a description of a thing. Whether an object happens to land as good, that's not the taste I'm talking about. Also, our time frame matters. When we are 5 - 8 years into this, which is basically going to happen in the blink of an eye, then what? Then what about the wells of real taste, our attitudes about consumption, our values about the deep dive, the slow reading, the cross referencing. That is what we must retain as deeply valuable.

Subscribe now

This is why I think taste, as in real taste, is about to be worth more than it has ever been. Because it’s the one thing that can’t be generated, you can generate the output but you cannot generate the person behind the choice, the vision, the point of view, the years of looking that taught someone what they actually think is good. That’s not a skill you can prompt for, it’s a life, it’s the whole reason art has ever mattered, that a particular human saw the world a particular way and made something only they could have made.

That has always been the definition, if you ask me. Not technique. Not finish. Not whether a thing is pleasant to look at. Art is a person with a vision deciding what matters and putting it where you can see it. Having an eye. Having something to say and the nerve to say it this way and not another. The machine can imitate the surface of all of that. It cannot have the vision, because vision requires a someone, and there is no one home.

I’m not worried about AI ruining art, I think it’s about to do something stranger but necessary in some ways. I think it’s about to make the human part of art and the part we’ve taken for granted which was always the actual point way more visible and more valuable than it’s been in my lifetime.

We just can’t feel it yet because we’re too early. But it’s coming, and when it lands, the people who spent these years sharpening their eye instead of panicking are going to be the ones who matter.

Sharpen your eye. That’s the whole instruction. I am going to get into this in a series of essays here.

Where have you already felt the flood starting? And what are you doing to keep your own eye sharp while everyone else argues about the machine?

Start with the question nobody can answer honestly, the one that sounds simple until you actually try to sit with it: do we like being online, or did we just get used to it? It’s harder than it looks, because getting used to a thing feels, in almost every way that matters, exactly like liking it. The first time you do anything uncomfortable, something inside you flags it, and the voice is quite clear about it. This costs me, it says. But do it enough times, on enough days, and the flag quietly stops going up, and it isn’t because the cost ever left, it’s because the part of you that was keeping watch got a little tired, and then a little tired after that. The thing we tolerated for long enough slowly, almost imperceptibly, becomes the thing we think we want, and none of us can really tell the difference any more, because the instrument that would have told us is the very same one that went quiet in the first place.

Subscribe now

So we can’t introspect our way out of this, and that is the real trouble, and it’s worse than the usual is-it-good-or-bad hand-wringing, because at least that tired old question has answers somewhere. This one is different. This one eats the very tool we’d use to answer it.

But there’s a deeper reason none of us can settle into it, a reason that has nothing to do with willpower or screen-time settings or any of the usual levers we’re told to pull. It’s older than all of that. We are built, every one of us, for a tribe of fifty, or maybe a hundred and fifty at the very outer edge, which is roughly the number of faces you could actually know, whose moods you could read across a fire, whose opinion of you genuinely bore on whether you ate that winter or didn’t. For almost the entire span of being human, that was the whole audience, the complete cast: fifty sets of eyes, all of them attached to people you’d see again tomorrow, and the day after, and for the rest of your life. The machinery we use to care what others think of us was tuned, slowly and over an unimaginable stretch of time, for exactly that scale, and for no scale larger than that.

And now we hand that same ancient hardware an audience of tens of thousands, made up almost entirely of strangers, faces we will never see and never meet, people whose approval changes nothing whatsoever about whether we survive the winter, and yet the old wiring fires anyway, eagerly and helplessly, because it simply cannot tell the difference. A like from someone in another country, someone we’ll never so much as glimpse, pulls the very same lever that a nod from a tribe-mate used to pull. We were never meant to be seen by this many people, and if you go looking, you’ll find there is no part of us, on any real or honest level, that actually wants this. The wanting is a misfire. The hunger is real enough, but the target is all wrong, in the same way that sugar cravings are real but were built for a world that had almost no sugar in it. A tribe is not tens of thousands of people. A tribe is the small handful you would notice missing at dinner.

Subscribe now

Which is exactly why, for those of us who make things for a living, all of this lands so much harder than it might otherwise. Online isn’t somewhere we drift off to in order to waste an evening. It is, all at once and in the same place, the studio, the gallery, the audience, the critics, the shop, and the rent, every one of them collapsed into the same endless scroll. The people who painted in 1950 went to the studio, and then maybe, later, to a gallery, and then home again, and those were separate places, with separate moods, which meant you could be quietly bad at one of them while staying entirely safe in another. We open one app and all of it fires at once, with no separation and no mercy: the place we make, the place we show, the place we get judged, the place we compare ourselves into the ground, and the place we sell. There is no logging off from that, not really, because logging off is the same thing as logging out of the career itself. The escape hatch that everyone so cheerfully points towards simply isn’t there for the people who happen to need it most.

And here is what all of this does to the work itself, which is the thing this piece is actually, quietly about. The part of us that makes and the part of us that performs are not the same part, and the trouble is that they cannot both have the room at once. Making is interior, and slow, and inconsistent, and quite rightly unobserved. Performing is the precise opposite of all that: outward-facing, sharp, endlessly aware of being seen. And once you have a presence to maintain, the performing part never fully powers down, it just hums away there in the corner of the studio, never quite off. So we catch ourselves mid-brushstroke already drafting the caption in our heads, already framing the unfinished thing for people who aren’t even in the room, already narrating the work before it’s anywhere near done, for an audience that exists only inside our own skulls but is, somehow, always assembled and always waiting. Fifty thousand imaginary faces, leaning in to watch us mix the paint/insert medium here.

This is an unlisted cost, isn’t it, the kind that never makes it onto the invoice. It isn’t the time spent posting, which at least you can measure. It’s the far quieter way that simply being findable bleeds backwards into the making itself. The all-seeing eye doesn’t wait politely outside the door until the work is finished and ready to be shown; it lets itself in, pulls up a chair, and watches us work from the very first mark. And none of us can do our best looking while we are being looked at, least of all by a crowd the size of one our nervous systems were specifically built to flee from. The work that comes out of the watched part of us is always, in the end, just slightly turned-out, just faintly aware of the camera in the corner. It performs being art, rather than simply being it.

And this is precisely where it collides, head-on, with the thing some of us never stop saying, which is that joy is the fuel, and that you guard the part of the work you secretly love the most, the stages nobody ever sees, the small bit that nobody will ever clap for, because that hidden part is exactly where the reason to keep going actually lives. Online is precisely, exactly, the place where the scoreboard walks into that room. And joy and a scoreboard, as anyone who has felt both knows, cannot be in the same room at the same time. So when the audience moves into the studio and makes itself at home, the very first thing it crowds out, the first thing to go, is the unobserved part, which was the only part that was ever fuel to begin with.

We notice it most acutely at the moment of upload. Every single time we post our own work, there’s a resistance, and it isn’t a crisis or a breakdown, it’s smaller and more particular than that. It’s a flinch. It’s the caption rewritten six times over, each draft just a little more casually confident than we honestly feel. It’s the hover of the thumb before we finally hit post, and then the closing of the app immediately afterwards, so that we don’t have to sit and watch the number refuse to move. And that flinch, I’ve come to think, isn’t a problem to be fixed or trained away at all. It might well be the very last working sensor we’ve got left, the one place where the old tribal alarm still faintly rings, the part of us that knows, on some level beneath the words, that being seen by ten thousand strangers is not normal, and never once was. The platforms want us to stop flinching, and so, it’s worth noticing, does almost all of the cheerful advice about “building your presence.” Be deeply suspicious of anything at all whose whole entire endpoint is the silencing of the only part of us that still remembers the right scale.

Subscribe now

Then we go and call it playing the game, and I do understand the impulse, but that little phrase is a sly one. A game has rules, and a finish, and a winner that you could in principle become before walking calmly away. There is no winning this. There is no final whistle. “Playing the game” quietly dresses up open-ended, endless exposure as a contest, which is a far kinder description than the thing actually deserves. The same goes for “I have to.” Nobody, in the end, held a gun to the upload button. The pressure is real enough, of course, it’s the rent, but that little phrase, have to, launders a genuinely hard choice into a non-choice, so that we never have to own the fact that we made it. The truer sentence is longer, and uglier, and it goes something like this: we choose to, under conditions that none of us designed and none of us can easily leave, and we don’t much like the choice. That one, notably, doesn’t fit on a caption.

So nobody here is going to tell you where your line is, or how on earth you might find it, because the whole point, the entire spine of all this, is that none of us can really trust our own read any more. The studios we post from are run by people whose actual paid job it is to move that line a little further while we sleep, and they are very, very good at it, and we are out here working against a hundred thousand years of wiring that was never once built for this particular fight. Knowing your limits, under those conditions, is poker against someone who is reading your tells far better than you can read them yourself.

So here, then, is the only thing I think is worth saying. The audience is in the room now, all ten thousand of them, whether any single one of us ever asked for them or not, and we probably can’t evict them at this point. But we can still tell, on the good days at least, which marks we made for ourselves and which ones we made only because we felt ourselves being watched. That difference, small as it sounds, is the whole thing. It is the very same difference as the one between joy and the scoreboard, between the stage that nobody sees and the post that performs, between the tribe of fifty we were quietly built for and the crowd of thousands we have somehow been handed. Protect the unwatched marks, whatever it costs you. They are the fuel. And they are also, more and more with every passing year, the only real proof that any of us is still in there, genuinely making, and not simply broadcasting out to a tribe that was never, ever meant to be this big.

When was the last time you made something for fifty people, or for one, or for nobody at all, and could you still tell the difference if someone asked you to, tomorrow?

Joy is my topic. I have painted about joy for 5 years solidly. I believe in joy as an act of resistance, that you must find it and hold it, and treasure it and exhibit it as frequently as you possibly can. Joy kind of has a branding problem. It sounds too soft, like something to say when you don’t have anything sharper to say. Joy is the best thing we have in our pocket, in our daily lives, in our work. Finding joy in adult hood is important work.

(a sculpture made by my daughter, experiencing the joy of objective free creation)

Let me make my case.

Creative lives are very long. You can’t quit being who you are creatively so whoever you are, whatever you do, you will keep creeping back to that state of enquiry and persistence as a baseline. You won’t just wake up and vow to never create again. Will you? You will reasonably have struggles, despair, doubt. The creative life is long and mostly unglamorous, with long periods of little to no reward. If the thing keeping you going is the hope of a result, you will run out of steam. Successful applications, shows, sales, recognition: all lovely. They come rarely, late, and then never feel how you imagined they would.

Also, this isn’t the fuel to work, but instead the opposite is true, the work is the fuel, and must be. The joy in the doing has to be there, it can’t be satisfaction, or pride. It has to be pure elation in your own making. Joy isn’t the reward you get at the end if things go well. It’s the fuel you need at the start, and all the way through, regardless of how things go. Which makes protecting it less of a nice-to-have and more of a survival skill.

Subscribe now

What this looks like:

I’m not talking about forcing a good mood. You can’t, and the forcing makes it worse. It’s more about protecting the conditions where joy can show up, and noticing it when it does.

1. Guard the part you actually love. Every practice has a bit you secretly enjoy most, and it’s usually not the bit that impresses anyone. For me I have certain stages that nobody ever sees and nobody would care about. I’ve learned to protect that part fiercely, because that’s where the fuel is. Lose it to efficiency or to chasing the impressive version, and you lose the reason you started. It is also another reason why I personally struggle with sharing the full picture of creation simply for visibility.

2. No one is keeping score, neither should you. Joy and comparison can’t be in the room at the same time. The day I’m measuring my work against everyone else’s is the day there’s no pleasure left in making it. So sometimes the whole job is just to put the scoreboard down for a few hours and make something for no reason other than that I want to see it exist.

3. Let yourself be impressed. By other people’s work, by a colour, by a thing that turned out better than you expected. The reflex to stay cool and unmoved is the enemy here. Wonder is fuel. Boredom dressed up as sophistication is not.

4. Treat joy as data, the same as everything else. I’ve said before that a session you can’t be present for is telling you something. So is joy. The work that brings it is usually the work you should be making more of. It’s not a distraction from the serious stuff. A lot of the time it’s the signal pointing straight at it.

I don’t think optimism is a personality, I think it’s a practice, the same as showing up to the studio is a practice. Some days it’s easy and some days you choose it against the evidence, and choosing it against the evidence is the thing. Not because you’re pretending things are fine. Because joy is the only fuel I’ve found that doesn’t run out the moment a result fails to arrive. And results fail to arrive most of the time.

So I stand by it, not as a mood but as a way of staying in the work for the long haul, which is the only timeline that’s ever mattered.

What’s the part of your work you secretly love most, the bit nobody claps for? And when did you last let yourself just enjoy it?

Subscribe now

There’s something I say to my kids when they get something wrong, or feel embarrassed about not knowing how to do something. I tell them: you need to know this, but I don’t expect you to. You either know it already, or you’re about to. No shame in where you currently are.

Subscribe now

I’ve been thinking about how rarely we apply that to ourselves as adults. As artists especially.

The win/loss framing is everywhere. You got the grant or you didn’t. The show was well-received or it wasn’t. The work sold or it’s still in the studio. We absorb these outcomes as verdicts on us, on the work, on whether we should keep going. What if that’s just the wrong unit of measurement entirely.

I had absolutely no idea about community and networking when I started out. It wasn’t in my DNA. Nobody handed me a map. And for a while, the not-knowing felt like a failure of character, like something I should have arrived already knowing. I hadn’t. But I was about to.

That reframe changes everything about how you move.

I applied to opportunities and didn’t get them. Many times. But each application made the next one sharper. I got better at articulating what the work was actually doing, better at understanding what I was trying to say about it, better at presenting myself in writing in a way that reflected who I actually was. None of that would have happened if I’d treated the rejections as evidence that I shouldn’t bother. They were training. The process was the point.

This is the thing about viewing everything as experience rather than a win or a loss: it keeps you in motion. A verdict stops you. An experience moves you forward.

Risk works the same way. The only real risk for an artist is doing nothing. If something isn’t working, the worst possible response is to keep doing exactly the same thing and hope the outcome changes. That applies within the work itself and it applies to every route you take toward visibility and exposure. A painting that isn’t working is telling you something. A strategy for getting your work seen that isn’t working is telling you something. The question is whether you’re willing to hear it as information rather than failure.

(image from @caninepoetry on X)

What this looks like in practice

1. Drop the verdict, keep the data. When something doesn’t land, resist the pull toward a conclusion about your worth or your talent. Ask what the experience is showing you instead. What did you learn about your work, your pitch, your process, your audience? That’s the only question worth sitting with.

2. Assume you’re in the learning phase, always. You either know it or you’re about to. Networking, writing about your work, applying for things, showing unfinished pieces, changing direction publicly, these are all learnable. None of them are character traits you either have or don’t. You’re not behind. You’re mid-process.

3. Change something before you give up. If the work isn’t working, change the material, the scale, the approach, the time of day you make it. If the route to exposure isn’t working, change the route. The only option that closes everything down is staying still. Risk is not the thing that might go wrong. Risk is the inertia of doing nothing.

4. Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to your kids. You need to know this, but I don’t expect you to yet. Would you tell a child they should be ashamed of not yet knowing how to do something hard and unfamiliar? Apply the same standard to yourself in the studio, in the application process, in every room you walk into where you feel like you don’t quite belong yet.

You didn’t know everything when you started. Neither did anyone else. The artists who kept going weren’t the ones who got it right immediately. They were the ones who decided each experience was just more material.

What’s something you’ve been treating as a loss that might actually be training?

Subscribe now

In 2025, I prepared a whole show in six weeks. Twice. Paintings, textiles, the lot. Six weeks of pure making, long days, the studio as the only world that mattered.

At other times, I have found it nearly impossible to finish a sketchbook drawing.

I’ve been sitting with that for a while.

The difference wasn’t energy. It wasn’t discipline. It wasn’t even inspiration, I had plenty.

When the show deadline existed, I sat in it. I worked through the bad drawings to get to the good ones. I didn’t have the luxury of escape. The work was the only option.

Without the deadline, I had limitless time: to seek and gather. And the digital world is the most elegant exit from discomfort ever designed.

This is what I keep thinking about, and I don’t hear it said enough: staying in the discomfort is where the work actually happens. Not around it. Not before it. In it. We are not encouraged to do this, not by entertainment culture, not by the internet, not by anything about the way we consume content right now. The entire architecture of the device is built to offer you a way out the moment something feels hard or slow or unresolved.

For any artist, anyone whose practice depends on sitting with uncertain material, this is not a small problem. This is existential.

Here’s the counterintuitive thing I’ve come to believe: being too inspired can lead to a lack of direction.

Too many inputs collapse into each other. You spend three hours looking at other people’s work, their practice, their process, their finished pieces, and somewhere in there, some doubt can creep in. You can’t always pinpoint where. But by the time you’re back in the studio, you’ve lost the thread of your own thinking.

Looking at others’ practice for too long will do that. The comparison is almost involuntary. Even when you’re not consciously measuring, some part of your brain is.

There’s another layer too: a stint on a device leads to less action. Not because you ran out of time. Because the dopamine you got from collecting, saving references, hoarding ideas, watching how someone else works, gave you a version of the feeling you get from making, without requiring you to actually make anything.

Dopamine from doing is far more potent than dopamine from collecting. But your nervous system doesn’t always know the difference in the moment. The phone offers a shortcut to a feeling that the studio makes you earn.

What I Actually Do

I’m not precious about this. I struggle with it like everyone else. But I’ve made some rules, and I keep them.

1. Slow audiobooks or reading. Non-subject material. Not podcasts about painting. Not documentaries about artists I admire. Slow uptake of something seemingly irrelevant, a novel, history, something that moves at the pace of a human thinking rather than the pace of content designed to hold your attention. The point is to let your mind go somewhere you didn’t plan, without the comparison trap that comes from consuming work in your own field.

2. No short form video. Full stop. Not reduced. Not “just a few.” None. Short form video is engineered to destroy your tolerance for productive discomfort. It is incompatible with a serious creative practice. Not a moral judgment, just cause and effect.

3. Keep comparison away from you as much as humanly possible. This requires active maintenance. It means being thoughtful about whose work you look at and when. Not never, but not when you’re mid-process and fragile. The unformed idea cannot survive contact with too many other people’s finished things.

The deadline of the show saved me from myself. Six weeks of real work happened because the escape route was closed. The sketchbook drawing stayed unfinished because I had unlimited options for what else to do instead.

The studio doesn’t need more inspiration. It needs you to stay in the room when it gets uncomfortable.

What’s your escape route, and what would happen if you took it away?