Beginning: On the Continuum of Making

Originality is a myth I no longer chase. Everything I create is a response to life as it unfolds around and within me. My work rises from lived realities, from assumptions, from fragments of memory that surface unrestrained. Often, my unconscious and subconscious do the choosing before I am even aware. They guide my hands, my gestures, my mark-making.

Each piece is shaped by more than the present- it carries the sediments of what has been and the longing for what might come. It belongs to a wider conversation; one that includes the spiritual, the intangible- the things that language often struggles to articulate.

When someone encounters (in) my work — say, a sweep of yellow — what they see is filtered through their own memory of that color. Maybe yellow reminds them of sunlight, or of slippers worn on a warm afternoon. Their emotional response, whether comfort or unease, becomes part of the work itself. This response joins in a reading and appreciation of the work of art. Art is never singular. It lives between the maker and the witness- in that shared and unspoken realm of memory.

The creative act is a collaboration — sometimes visible and easily acknowledged; at other times, muted and complex. I listen, I read the energy of a space, I let curiosity lead. I question what is before me and the layers beneath. Amid that questioning, pictures begin to form — ideas are stitched from what I have absorbed, what I have loved, and what I have lost.

Human beings are wired for connection. We seek others for affirmation, for the quiet proof that we are not alone in what we know or feel. This need for connection shapes my creative process. Art making is not a solitary act. It is about listening to the world, to memory, to the hidden pulse of inanimate materials that want to speak.

Even the act of signing my name or giving the artwork a title is not the end -it is simply the beginning of another life. Once the work leaves my studio, it continues its journey — into someone’s living room, a gallery wall, perhaps a museum, or to a corner somewhere in a person’s life. It breathes differently in each new space. It gains new meanings, new significance, beyond my control or knowing.

That is the power of art: it refuses to end. It keeps living, reshaping the air around it, long after the artist has moved on. And maybe that is what I’m always reaching for — not originality, but continuity. Not perfection, but presence. A dialogue that never really closes.

Interview with Joyjayne Bassey, Grinnell, Iowa, 2025

(Joyjayne Bassey has these kinds of conversations with creatives that she later translates into standalone poems. You can follow her on Instagram @joyjayne_bassey)