A home creation project
Creativity is elusive, curious and always pressing a person into deep inquiries of the self, even in a home renovation!
Hello! It’s been a month since my last post. My family and I moved back into our home after a 2-year renovation, or, what has been deep immersion into a hugely expensive creative project involving all the elements of making: patience, risk-taking, unknowing, beauty, doubt, and revelation.
Thankfully, the story of our family came through in all the choices. That’s all I wanted. And also a dramatic entrance and “water closet.”
And so, what surged forward in this creative project?
Firstly, unsurprisingly, it became evident that I am a consumer. I live in a world that is constantly trying to sell me an idea of what my life should be like, and I buy into it (!!).
Secondly, creativity is elusive, curious and always pressing a person into deep inquiries of the self and our world.
Just when you think you’re doing something original and interesting, you realize you’re regurgitating something you saw elsewhere. And it seems to be everywhere! Your sense of aesthetic and taste is a confluence—of what you’ve consumed, lived in, and sought comfort from in pivotal life moments.
I don’t want my home to feel like a hotel, I’d say aloud to no one. I want to create a space with a heart beat, and I want it to tell stories about our origins, values, what we aspire to and find calm in. Why is that so difficult? Why do I find myself copying what I see all around me?
George Saunders notes that mimicking is a normal part of the creative process. It’s actually good practice, he says. It’s how we begin to develop an ear for things. It’s a starting point. But then, revision is where the creative impulse pumps, like a river breeching its banks.
He says this about young writers mimicking their favourite authors:
In the end, though, the young writer will find that, no matter how close she gets to recreating the voice of her hero, something’s missing.
What is it?
Well, it’s her (precious, hard-earned) lived experience.
….we can’t get to our own deep truths in someone else’s voice.
In the process of making many micro-decisions and wandering through warehouses, online images, antique shops, Architectural Digest YouTube videos, it became evident, slowly, that there was an alternative to the white bathroom tile my mind went to first (this will relate to loftier ideas on the creative process, I promise)…I could go dark, like the bathrooms I found myself in back in the 80s. And the towel bar could be the fox hook I saw in that small shop, reminding me that my son once loved foxes and wanted to be named Fox. And we can add a lantern to our bedroom because we were mesmerized once by an old man lighting lanterns in Japan.
George Saunders:
As we make the thousands of micro-choices presented to us over the course of our revision process, we are constantly infusing “more us” into the text.
Every pause in the creation process can be an opportunity for deep listening, without critique, without judgement.
For me, the home creation process did eventually become a listening process (after and during many boughts of self-critique and judgement). When I applied my writer brain to the renovation process, I could see where a decision was lifeless, bereft of our family’s personality and story. And I could dig into my creative intelligence to make the intangible, tangible through objects, through textures, through negotiations of space.
I don’t want my home to feel like a hotel.
I said aloud to no one.
And a stream of creative decisions miraculously became an entry into uncovering “soft places to land.” Which is what a home is, n’est pas?
Thanks for reading.x