Artists on Couches investigates creative energy and consciousness through the collective voices of artists from around the world. By thoughtfully answering these questions — Where do ideas come from? What is intuition? How does creative energy move through us? What does it feel like? — artists attempt to define what is undefinable: the mysterious forces they experience while creating.

AOC is itself a conceptual artwork built from conversation and collective energy rather than physical materials. There’s no physical object. The exchange itself is the art.

This ongoing project strips creativity to its core: not the objects artists produce, but the consciousness, energy, and connection at work throughout the creative process. By documenting how artists access creative force, the archive captures the nature of creativity itself.

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944)

From 1896-1908, af Klint participated in séances with four other women artists called “The Five,” sitting together to receive spiritual instructions about creativity and consciousness from entities she called “The High Masters.” She described herself as a medium through which images came, creating abstract paintings that visualized invisible spiritual forces. AOC emerged from a similar vision: while meditating during recovery from my head injury, I kept seeing myself sitting on a couch with other artists, discussing the mysteries of the creative process, and that vision became this project investigating where ideas come from and how creative consciousness channels through us.

Rirkrit Tiravanija (1961–present)

In 1990, Tiravanija cooked pad thai in a gallery and served it to visitors. There was nothing to buy or hang because the exchange itself was the art. AOC works identically: there is no object, the conversation between me and artists worldwide is the artwork.

Sophie Calle (1953–present)

Calle creates projects collecting intimate stories from strangers through structured prompts, like asking 107 women to interpret her breakup email in Take Care of Yourself (2007) or inviting blind people to describe beauty in The Blind (1986). She builds archives from individual voices that reveal invisible emotional territories we all share but rarely talk about. AOC does the same thing: I ask artists questions about their invisible creative experiences (where ideas come from, what intuition feels like, how flow works), and the patterns that emerge across hundreds of responses reveal how creative consciousness actually operates.

I’m deeply inspired by transcendental artists like Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, and Emma Kunz, who sought to visualize invisible forces and spiritual consciousness. Their work mirrors what I explore in my paper practice: giving form to energy that can only be felt.

Meditation is central to how I work. That’s where many of my ideas originate. In 2020, while recovering from a head injury, I meditated daily and kept receiving the same vision: sitting on a couch with other artists, discussing the mysteries of the creative process. That vision became Artists on Couches.

Artists on Couches is simple: I email artists a list of questions about creativity and ask them to answer whichever one resonates with their practice, then send me a photo of themselves on a couch or chair. The couch creates this illusion that we’re sitting together having a cozy philosophical conversation about inspiration, intuition, and where ideas come from. Even though we’ve never been in the same room, there’s an intimacy to it. An exchange and a connection.

To create the most illuminating and thought-provoking conversations possible, I carefully select and invite artists based on the merit of their work and my personal resonance to it, their awareness of their own practice, and their willingness to reflect openly on the creative process.

The Artist on Couches conversations are prompted with intentionally-constructed questions to invoke genuine reflection of the participating artists. 

Each artist chooses one question that resonates with them and their personal practice. The questions are designed to go beneath the surface:

• What does creative flow feel like?

• Describe the moment of inspiration.

• How does intuition feel when you follow it?

• Do ideas come from within or through you?

• How does your practice connect you to something larger?

Their responses, paired with a photo of themselves on a couch or chair, become part of the growing archive.

This project is part of my art practice because it explores parallel ideas to my paper work, just through a different form. For over 30 years, I’ve studied energy from both scientific and spiritual perspectives: physics, astronomy, meditation, and energetic healing. For the past 12 years, I’ve worked with paper to translate invisible energy into physical form through meditation and intuition.

AOC investigates the same questions about creative consciousness and energy, but instead of working alone with paper, I’m working collectively through conversation. Both practices ask: how does creative energy move through us? How do we use this energy to infuse meaning into our art? How do we make the invisible visible? One answers through material, the other through voice and reflection.