The myth of the perfect, clean workspace

I was talking to a younger friend about this a while back—your Internet presence is increasingly more valuable than your real-life presence. Which is weird and dystopian and I don’t really know how to think about it. But it’s true, and I think people who are like,  I don’t need the Internet , don’t understand the extent to which much of the

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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.

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!

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... See more