What are the (mental) tools for making?

In 2025 I’ve went to Japan, Kyoto for a short artist in residence at Bridge Studios. Here I’ve started my project What are the (mental) tools for making? For one month I have stayed at Bridge Studios to research what conditions are needed to come into creative process. The residency resulted in a workshop and a series of small sculptural studies inspired by the Zen philosophy and the Zen Gardens.

After the residency I have been working on my installation Between knowing and Unknowing. This installation is a series of garden sculptures originating from ‘thinking tools’: forms from the packaging of everyday objects and necessary tools, such as a pencil sharpener, scissors, or a hair clip, as well as from a Japanese rock face learning kit. During a working period in Kyoto, I used these forms as a way to reflect on the creative process, on what is needed to enter the right state for making.

Within this installation, the more concrete forms are placed on land. They refer to moments of support, direction, or recognition: a ‘tool’ that has already been given a name. In the water, more open and less defined forms appear: the ‘stepping stones’. These floating elements move subtly with their surroundings and emerge from a different approach, not from necessity, but from an attraction to form, imprint, or material. They represent another stage within the process: not-knowing, searching, experimenting.

The installation unfolds along the boundary between land and water, between what is fixed and what is still shifting. By placing the sculptures in relation to one another and to the site itself, a space emerges in which thought and the making process do not develop linearly, but move between moments of certainty and doubt. A space in which knowing and unknowing can exist side by side.