I've spent most of my life making things. Creativity started as something closer to survival than a choice, and it never really stopped being that.
I started as a photography student, then spent years in hands-on visual merchandising, working out how things actually look and get seen in a space. That led to a corporate visual merchandising role in Australia, where I also did curatorial work, choosing what got shown and why, and later the same kind of role in the US, for a major American retailer.
From there the professional work kept turning into something else: styling, then art direction, then photography, then styling again. But underneath all of it, there was almost always something happening that had nothing to do with a client, work I made just because I needed to make it. Some periods it went quiet. It never fully stopped.
Working from other people's briefs the whole way through taught me something particular. Clients rarely say what they actually want, not because they're hiding it, but because they usually don't fully know either. You learn to peel back what's said until you find what's actually meant, and hand that back to them instead. It's a strange kind of mind-reading, and it only works if you're genuinely paying attention to the person, not just the brief.
For a long time I would have called those different chapters.
I don't think that anymore.
They accumulated. The eye I built as an art director didn't disappear when I became a photographer; it just started working on my own images instead of other people's. The instinct I built curating exhibitions didn't go away when I started coaching, it just changed jobs. I used to decide what deserved a wall. Now I help someone notice what deserves their attention, not because I've decided what belongs in their life, but because it helps to have someone looking closely alongside you.
Skills accumulate. Taste accumulates. Judgement accumulates.
So do the mistakes, the jobs that didn't work out, none of which I'd have chosen as professional development, all of which shaped how I see now.
At some point I started asking a different question: what actually keeps creative work connected to the person making it? Not the brief, not the client, not the algorithm. The person.
I'd watched enough people, including myself, lose that connection when things got unstable. The usual response is self-doubt, and self-doubt has a way of making the work feel impossible, or making you feel unworthy of it.
Those questions are what led me here. I trained formally as a focalizing practitioner, hold two diplomas in creative coaching, studied fine art at postgraduate level, and kept building a studio practice of my own, cyanotype, artist books, whatever holds my attention. Today the work is coaching, workshops, teaching, community arts projects, and a book I'm currently writing.
I'm interested in curiosity more than certainty. Attention more than optimisation. Experiment more than performance. I think boredom can be useful, and that making things matters even when nothing about it is being monetised.
I haven't solved creative identity. I'm still living it the same way I always have, because I never really had the option not to.