“A life of making isn’t a series of shows or projects, or productions, or things; it is an everyday practice.” Anne Hamilton
Creativity is often framed as a sudden spark — a flash of inspiration. In reality, creativity is built through practice. Your first idea becomes a catalyst. Creative work requires time: interrogation, reworking, and refinement. It often requires unlearning.
As we age, we are taught, subtly and repeatedly, to abandon imagination in favour of certainty. Creativity becomes defined and contained, rather than unlimited and expansive. Fear and doubt begin to feel like barriers instead of natural companions to experimentation. Mistakes, happy accidents, and even failure are not signs of inadequacy; they are essential to the creative process, just as they are to learning itself.
You are not born with a finite number of ideas. Creativity is generative. It produces infinite possibilities: new ways of thinking, solutions to problems, relationships with materials, and approaches to connection. Think of creativity like a muscle — it strengthens through daily use. Small acts of making compound.
If fear or doubt arises, that is a sign you are on the right track. We naturally fear the unknown, but it is precisely in the unknown that creativity flourishes.
Another barrier that emerges with age is the pressure to become an ‘expert.’ Curator Marcia Tucker resisted this position, stating, “Experts are people who are deeply involved with what they already know, and I don’t want to be one of them.” The amateur, the one who does not yet know, remains open, curious, and willing to experiment. It is in this state of not-knowing, or perhaps un-knowing, that innovation becomes possible.
When I see children create, I see unrestrained creativity. Their work is not measured against invisible standards or weighed down by fear it does not ‘measure up.’ There is freedom in that, and it is a freedom worth reclaiming.
So, make something every day. It doesn’t matter what. Write a poem, a post, a story, an article. Play with materials, meaning, and process. Dance. Sing. Perform. Animate. Compose. Curate. Film. Draw. Document. Archive. Just make.
Learn as you go and embrace the amateur in you. Work in the unknown. Fear, doubt, and failure are not signs to stop — they are your friends. They tell you that you are moving beyond what is familiar. Nothing new comes from sticking to what you already know.
Creativity is a practice, a daily commitment to curiosity, exploration, and growth.
Hamilton, Ann. Making Not Knowing. In Learning Mind: Experience into Art, edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Jacquelynn Baas. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010, p. 69.
Tucker, Marcia. Out of Bounds: The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker. Edited by Lisa Phillips, Johanna Burton, Alicia Ritson, and Kate Wiener. Getty Research Institute and The New Museum, 2019, p. 240.
