I don’t believe there are creative people.
I believe there are people who show up.
Creativity, for me, has never been a personality trait or a lightning strike. It’s a discipline. Something closer to exercise than inspiration. You don’t wait until you feel strong to move your body. You move your body so strength remains possible.
I’ve always treated creativity like it was my career, even before it was visible as one.
I started in graphic design and marketing, where creativity lived inside constraints. Briefs, timelines, systems, outcomes. Strategy and aesthetics weren’t separate things. They fed each other. Creativity wasn’t indulgent. It was functional. It solved problems. It clarified ideas. It made things land.
At university, I never stayed inside the syllabus. I added clubs, short courses, side rooms. Abroad, I treated opportunity as something to reprogram. In Japan, I changed the structure of my exchange so I could take local classes. I studied product design and art history. I researched oshima tsumugi silk, not as a motif, but as a system of labour, material intelligence, and time. I followed threads that didn’t need permission.
Even when my career took more corporate or strategic shapes, I knew the practice needed feeding elsewhere. So I worked on things privately. Quietly. Without witnesses. Not because I was waiting for a moment, but because capacity disappears if you don’t return to it.
My process has always been physical first. Photograph and collage. Repeat. My visual brain moves faster than my word brain, so I let images do the thinking until language catches up later. Journals pile up. Gifs get made because sometimes a still image isn’t enough. Words arrive eventually as scribbles, prose, mind maps, usually after the work already knows what it is.
I like limits. I choose materials the way you choose rules for a game. Fewer inputs, more attention. I watch what happens when things are used up, repurposed, found, left over. Practice lives there, in constraint, in repetition, in attention, not in novelty.
That’s why I don’t think creativity is something you are.
It’s something you maintain.
People say they’re jealous of creativity as if it’s an inheritance. As if it arrived fully formed. But what they’re often seeing isn’t talent. It’s continuity. It’s the accumulation of small, unglamorous decisions to keep showing up. To keep returning. To keep treating the work seriously even when no one is watching.
Large public projects don’t create that. They reveal it.
Creative practice doesn’t begin when the lights come on, and it doesn’t end when they go down. It lives in how you structure your days, your learning, your attention. It lives in what you protect. It lives in choosing to do the work again, even when it would be easier not to.
I don’t wait to feel inspired.
I show up so inspiration has somewhere to land.
And then I get it done.
