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.

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.

Marina Abramović sat across from strangers for 736 hours in The Artist is Present, making energetic transmission visible through silence and proximity. I’m after something similar, but the artists participating are spread across the world, so the exchange happens online and through reflection and shared understanding instead of physical presence.

Like On Kawara spending his whole life painting dates, documenting consciousness one day at a time, I’m building an archive the same way. Every day, another artist, another couch, another reflection. Patterns show up slowly. Things I couldn’t see in one response become clear after thousands of them.

Rirkrit Tiravanija became known for cooking pad thai in galleries and inviting people to eat together. The meal was free, the interaction was the artwork. He wasn’t interested in objects you could buy or hang on a wall. The art was what happened between people in that moment.

AOC works similarly. There’s no object to purchase, no finished product. The art is in the exchange itself: me asking, them reflecting, all of us slowly building this collective understanding of creative consciousness together.

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.

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.

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.