This week I invite you to visit my beautiful mess in my studio. In my day-to-day life I am an organized person and like things to be evenly and purposefully arranged. I have that going on in my studio as well, except when i am creating. Now…things are much more in a muddle. I guess I could freak out and get to work cleaning it up, but lately I’ve been enjoying the more chaotic nature of my surroundings. It’s like going into the wilderness, never knowing what you’re going to find.
So instead of cleaning it up or rearranging things to look more orderly, I will give you a tour of things as they truly are in my creative space.
See this pile on the workbench? This is where work I am currently interested in or working on has landed. They sprawl comfortably, casually intermingling, awaiting my attention. The size of the pile ebbs and flows. But a mass of material always remains, waiting for me to pick through and add or subtract to other pieces in progress.
The place where I find the deepest, most random, and fascinating gathering of pictures is in my flat files. I rarely know what all is in there, but I know it is interesting enough to have once been placed there. It is always an adventure to pull open a drawer and find the perfect piece to add to something I am working on! Right now it is building, expanding itself, fermenting and mating in the dark.
Every couple of months I get things all arranged and sorted out and I can see clearly what is on top of pile. I continually resolve to dive in and at least take inventory, but so far I haven’t had the heart or the true inclination to trash anything, and the layers just keep accumulating and things become less well 
aligned. I know some day I will use it -- famous last words, right?
Anyhow, the point is, no matter how much I organize and put things where they go, there are always new piles forming. They are the fertile soil in which my imaginative arrangements of words and pictures and ideas grow. Every time work in my studio I feel it's energy. I look at the walls and the shelves and see the smiling faces of my favourite people or reminders of my travels or my past to fuel my imagination. I enter the chaos without resistance or need to fix it up, and I play with the chaos.