Artists, like humans, contain multitudes and when it comes to the spaces we create in, they all look different. If we do find ourselves on the messier side, we also know that there’s a difference between a mess you love, that inspires, and keeps the connections flowing, and a mess that blocks, hinders, and holds you back. A fun mess and a depressing garbage mess are two very different things. Mess can also be cyclical—certain projects create more mess than others, and sometimes things just get out of control and you know eventually you’ll reel it back in again.

The Mess of a Creative Space

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It's a false binary to say “artists are messy” or to assume that those with well-organized and cleaned studios somehow aren’t doing creative work. We all come to our creative practice in our own way. A societally-induced value judgement on “clean” vs. “messy” has however lodged itself deep within us.

The Mess of a Creative Space

Cleanliness—as the saying goes, and many of us have probably internalized—is next to godliness. To be clean: good. To be messy: bad. While cleanliness might indicate a space free of many things, it’s heavily ladened with value judgement.

We reflect that judgement onto ourselves, resulting in the shame that’s present in that third question in my pol... See more

The Mess of a Creative Space

This makes its way into our subconscious, influencing our own tendency to crop things out or move things around if we’re going to take a picture of our creative space. Oh the horror if someone were to learn that real life was happening in the same place you make art!

The Mess of a Creative Space

Anne Helen Petersen has written about the “professionalization” of homes, thanks to the “market-reflected gaze,” and I think that this extends to the creative space as well—we base our expectations of our creative spaces not off of how we work best, but what we think creative spaces should look like. That clean and organized aesthetic also overflow... See more

The Mess of a Creative Space

Sometimes the process of thinking looks like needless chaos from the outside

But thats what creatives should be doing.

Banging on random objects just to see what it might shake out.

Creatives need to make a mess in order to arrive at clarity.

Apparently there exist in the world artists and writers for whom chaos is a boon. I am certainly of the opposite camp, unable to even begin to think or feel very deeply until every last bit of clutter has been shredded, filed, deleted, delegated, or at least hidden away somewhere in a crate. So Monday mornings begin with the ritual clearing from my... See more

Jonathan Simons, Analog Sea Review

messes are the artist’s true friend

- Bird by Bird