The Space Between Seeing and Becoming

On creative vision, self-authorship and trusting what has not yet taken form.

Sometimes the vision arrives long before the evidence. We can see something. A body of work. An exhibition. A different way of working. Perhaps even a different version of ourselves. It can feel strangely complete in our imagination while, in front of us, everything remains unfinished.

I had a very clear vision of myself sitting in a gallery surrounded by my work. I saw the walls. I imagined how the pieces might inhabit the space. I sensed the atmosphere I wanted to create and how I hoped someone might feel as they move through it.

And then I walk into my studio.

There are photographs and materials, fragments and unfinished pieces. Things lean against walls and gather on tables. Ideas existing alongside practical decisions that haven't yet been made.

Everything seems to be sitting at the edge of becoming.

There is a peculiar vulnerability in holding a vision before you have the evidence that you can make it real.

The vision can arrive whole. Perhaps this is one of the strangest parts of creating anything:

One photograph. One stitch. One decision. One morning in the studio.

The distance between those small acts and the thing we can already see in our imagination can sometimes feel enormous. It is easy, from inside that distance, to decide that we are behind. That we should have made more by now. That we should know exactly what we are doing. That if the idea were really going to work, surely it would already be taking shape.

But I am beginning to wonder whether imagining and making require different states of us. There are periods when I am deeply inside the physical act of making and others when I seem to be building the internal architecture of the work instead.

Looking.

Gathering.

Moving things around.

Allowing connections to form.

Imagining the space the work might eventually occupy. From the outside, those periods can look like very little is happening. From the inside, an entire world may be assembling itself.

I have been thinking about seedheads.

We so often use the seed as a metaphor for creativity: planting an idea, nurturing it, waiting for the first green shoot to appear. But a seedhead tells a different story. It comes after the flowering. It contains the weather it has survived, the energy of the season, the growth that has already happened. Everything has been distilled into something small enough to carry forward.

There are periods in our creative lives when perhaps we are not looking for a new shoot at all.

Perhaps the question isn't:

What could I become?

but:

What am I already carrying?

The distinction feels important. Because it changes creativity from a perpetual search for the new into an act of recognition. Sometimes what we are looking for isn't somewhere ahead of us. It has already been gathering.

My studio has become a vessel for this. At the moment it holds what is and what might be simultaneously.

Materials, photographs, fragments, possibilities. Some things have found their form. Others haven't. I am still listening for what the work wants to become. And I am having to trust that this is part of making too.

Trust that looking is part of the work.

Trust that thinking is part of the work.

Trust that the hours in which seemingly very little is produced aren't necessarily empty.

Trust that eventually something will shift and thought will give way to making.

I don't know exactly when that will happen. I am practising trusting it. Perhaps that is one of the quieter skills we develop as artists: learning to stay with something before we can prove that it is going anywhere.

But there is another part of this that interests me.

Sometimes it isn't only the work we can see before it exists.

We can see ourselves differently too.

There are moments when we glimpse the artist we might become — or perhaps recognise the artist who has been there all along. And seeing her can be surprisingly uncomfortable. Because once we recognise our own potential, we have some responsibility towards it. We can no longer quite pretend that we don't know.

The question changes from:

Could I become this?

to:

What am I going to do with what I have seen?

I've spoken about intuition for many years and more recently, self-authorship. Learning to hear that quieter inner voice has shaped much of my creative life. It is allowing that inner knowing to shape our choices, our boundaries, our rhythms and, slowly, our lives. I think creation asks something similar of us.

Perhaps the vision is the intuitive part. The image that arrives before we know how to make it. The idea that keeps returning. The inexplicable feeling that there is something here worth following.

But then comes the more difficult part.

We have to choose it.

Not once, in one great declaration of intent, but repeatedly and often very quietly. We choose it when we return to the studio. When we protect an hour for the work. When we follow the idea that doesn't quite make sense yet. When we make one photograph, add one stitch, move one piece across the room and look again. Perhaps this is how a vision becomes a reality.

I've often felt uncomfortable with the idea of manifestation when it suggests that wanting or visualising something strongly enough will somehow draw it towards us. My experience of creativity feels more reciprocal than that. The vision matters. Imagination matters. Being able to see something before it exists is part of being creative. But eventually the vision asks something of us.

Will you make choices on my behalf?

Will you give me your time?

Will you allow me to change you?

Will you keep choosing me before there is any evidence that I will become what you imagined?

Perhaps manifestation is less about calling something towards us and more about participating in its becoming. We begin to organise our lives around something we have recognised as true. And slowly, through hundreds of apparently insignificant acts, the distance between the imagined and the real begins to close.

I don't think this means that every vision we have will unfold exactly as we imagine it. Perhaps that isn't really the point. The finished work may be different. The exhibition may change. The artist who eventually inhabits that imagined future may not be exactly the person I can currently see. Making has its own intelligence. It changes us as much as we change it. But I think there is something important about allowing ourselves to see what might be possible before we know how to get there.

And then remaining in relationship with it. Not demanding certainty. Not waiting until we feel completely ready. Not abandoning the vision simply because the evidence hasn't arrived yet. Just making the next small choice on its behalf. Perhaps this is the space between seeing and becoming.

The vision is no longer simply something we imagine, but neither has it fully taken form. We are somewhere in between. And perhaps the work of that space is not to know exactly how everything will unfold. It is to recognise what is already there. To make room for it. To keep choosing it. Because eventually trust has to become something more than a feeling.

Trust becomes an action.