Studio Note 05 – July 2026
A note on creative emergence, recognition and the ideas that wait for us.
Every so often, a piece of work asks us to look at it again. Not because it has changed, but because we have.
A drawing that once felt complete suddenly reveals something we hadn’t noticed before. A forgotten sketch begins to echo through newer work. Shapes, rhythms and visual decisions that once seemed instinctive start to make sense in ways they never did at the time.
It can feel strangely disorientating. As though the work knew something before we did.
That happened to me recently.
While sharing the story behind HODL, one of the pieces from my 2026 Wearable Art Collection, I found myself returning to a drawing that has been hanging in my home for years.
I wasn’t looking for inspiration and I wasn’t revisiting it to develop a new collection. I was simply looking again.
And in doing so, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.
Why do old drawings sometimes become new ideas?
We often imagine creativity as a straight line. An idea appears. We develop it, refine it and eventually, we finish it – or at least we get to a point where we don’t do any further work on it.
But increasingly, I don’t think that’s how creativity always works. I’ve discovered that for me, the making, sometimes, comes first, with the understanding arriving later.
Looking back at that earlier drawing, I realised it wasn’t simply something I’d made during a difficult period of my life. It contained visual ideas that had quietly travelled with me ever since. Not consciously. Almost beneath awareness. But there they were, repeated forms, rhythms, the sense of movement. The visual language that would eventually become HODL had already begun to emerge, years earlier.
Not because I planned it.
Because it was already part of the way I saw.
Can creative work know more than we do?
That sounds like an unusual question, I know. Yet many artists speak about recognising recurring themes only when looking back over years of work.
A writer discovers they have been exploring the same questions across several books.
A musician hears the same emotional patterns appearing in different compositions.
An artist notices familiar marks emerging across sketchbooks separated by decades.
The work begins to reveal its own continuity. Not because it possesses consciousness. But because our creative instincts often recognise patterns long before our analytical minds do.
Perhaps making is one way we think before language catches up.
Why do we feel pressure to understand our work immediately?
Perhaps because we live in a culture that values certainty. Artists are often expected to explain what a piece means almost as soon as it is finished.
- Where did the idea come from?
- What does it represent?
- What were you trying to say?
- Sometimes we know. Sometimes we genuinely don’t and sometimes the most honest answer is that we are still discovering what the work was trying to teach us.
Meaning doesn’t always arrive alongside the finished piece.
Sometimes it emerges through time.
What happens when we look backwards instead of forwards?
I’m beginning to learn that looking backwards isn’t necessarily about nostalgia – it’s about recognition.
Old sketchbooks stop becoming archives and start becoming conversations. Half-finished ideas, with the power of hind-sight become invitations rather than failures. Forgotten drawings become evidence that our creative lives are often more continuous than they appear.
The work begins to tell us something about ourselves.
Not who we were, but who we have been becoming all along.
Why does this matter?
Perhaps because many of us throw ideas away too quickly.
We dismiss old work because it no longer reflects where we are today. We move on before asking what it might still have to teach us. Yet creativity isn’t always about producing something entirely new.
Sometimes it is about recognising what has been quietly waiting for us all along.
The older I become, the less I believe that creativity is simply invention. Increasingly, it feels like an ongoing conversation. One in which today’s work is often answering questions that yesterday’s work was only beginning to ask.
Perhaps that is why some drawings refuse to let us forget them. Not because they belong to the past, but because they are still becoming part of our future.
Maybe creativity isn’t only about making.
Maybe it’s also about learning to recognise ourselves in the work we’ve already made.
And maybe we only get to see that over time.
A question to leave you with…
Have you ever returned to an old piece of work and discovered something you couldn’t have seen when you first created it?