Watched this the other night and thought that they brought up some good questions. As a person who has always struggled with justifying my existence and why I choose to do with my limited time on this earth what I do, the question seemed like a good way to maybe form some thoughts beyond – I don’t know. I just do.
It’s so easy to just drift along on the seas of fate and (to continue the salty metaphor) not do the difficult work of tacking into the wind and setting a deliberate course. So much of my life has been focused on survival that there was limited time for reflection, planning or plotting with an end goal in mind. It’s only now that I’m getting a wee bit more time to take a deep breath and take a good long look around and decide which path to take.
So, why do I create?
All my life I’ve been altering the reality I find around me. The methods have changed greatly over time, everything from building dams and waterways in the swamp behind our house as a child, to more hedonistic pursuits that pushed me beyond thought as a teen and young adult, through words in poetry and prose, photos to show what I saw and now the creation of tiny worlds.
I’ve always wanted to get the thoughts, memories and origin story out of my head and offloaded somehow so it doesn’t rattle around anymore, popping up unexpectedly in the most intrusive ways.
Photography and words, whether they be prose, poetry or non-fiction, have been my primary means of creation for so many years. That and food. There is so much that can be conveyed through the creation of food, for me mostly the good stuff of love, comfort and helping to keep body and soul together. Lately though I’ve been drifting towards more tangible means of translating the inside world to the outer one through the creation of tiny worlds.
I’ve only managed to finish up two so far (Tiny Study and Horgon8) but there are at least 3 more tiny worlds plotted out to greater or lesser extent in my big red book. I refuse to let myself start the next world until I finish what’s already three quarters of the way done (I’m looking at you Tiny Cliff) because otherwise I’d never finish anything. Coming up with ideas is never a problem, neither is starting them. It’s always the finishing up where I fall flat.
Bouncing around is allowed in the more practical creative endeavors like mending or making a pair of functional potholders. (recently realized that my favorite potholders were coming up on 25 years? so it wasn’t unreasonable that they’re falling apart to the point of being unusable). There I allow myself to work on what mind and body desire and can handle in the moment.
It took a while (like two years while) to figure out how to build the tiny figures I need to finish up Tiny Cliff. Turns out I’m working in something that is probably 1:500 scale. Wish I’d figured that out sooner but most of that time was just the issue churning around in the back of my head, not ass in seat, hands on the project.
Now I have to actually put in the time, ass in seat hands on the project to finish it up. That’s always difficult when mind and body have to be both able and willing at the same time.
But words count, right?
Why do I create what I create?
To bring order to my chaos while sharing it with the world outside my head.
