People Assume I’m More Intentional Than I Am

People assume I am more intentional than I am. They think I planned things. They think the choices were deliberate and part of some wider idea, quietly unfolding in the background.

Sometimes that is true.

Often it is not.

A lot of decisions happen because something looked wrong and I changed it. Or because I got bored and moved something slightly to the left. Or in my digital work, because I duplicated a shape “just to test it” and then forgot which one was the original. Some pieces on this site exist purely because I made a mistake and didn’t feel strongly enough to fix it.

There are works here that feel carefully balanced, even though they came from an incorrect crop. Repeating forms that look symbolic but started as visual clutter I never cleaned up. Colour choices that appear intentional but may have been a total experiment and I’m still not sure if they’re right.

Patterns appear after the fact. Sometimes the meaning shows up once everything is already finished and I’m looking at it like it belongs to someone else. I’ll notice connections between pieces and think, oh, so that’s what I’m doing, as if it wasn’t happening in real time.

I don’t dislike intention. I just usually find it later.

The work tends to arrive first, slightly unannounced, and the explanation follows a little while after, trying to sound convincing. Now, you could say this is unconscious intention doing its quiet work, or you could say they are happy accidents. I’ll let you decide!

If you want to see what unplanned decisions look like when they’re lined up together, there is work elsewhere on this site.