Imagination Makes Me A Fool
Zara jacket //
(as top) c/o // Topshop pants // Topshop heels // Forever 21 tights
Someone once told me working in creative meant accepting that creativity is subjective. What I may consider art in my eyes may be disregarded as trash in another's. And that's the hardest part about displaying your own work for the world: we take the risk of allowing our art to be vulnerable in harsh reality. And your job as the artist is to decide whether or not, your willingness to share yourself creatively is worth bruising your ego and confidence continually until someone, too, shares your artistic vision.
My creative nature has made me an inevitable fool to myself. I've taken risks, made mistakes, and displayed my visions out loud if only to share a visual glimpse of my inner self. All of this so that I could be understood in the limelight of creative structure and all while I've been critiqued, dismissed, and unacknowledged for them more than once. It's a frustrating battle to put in 10x the effort and only get less than half the return, especially for someone who is so in tune with her feelings. I've conveyed my art for people to judge with their own subjective sense of creativity so many times that it has left me doubtful and insecure with my own craft. I've questioned whether it's worth exposing my vulnerability like that--showcasing parts of myself visually, only for people to tear it down so easily. But that's the necessary qualm of outreaching in the field of arts. I'm learning that my eyes bear sight only to what I can understand and though my goal is to conceptualize my imagination publicly, it'll always be an ongoing struggle of compromising for an assimilated comprehension. What are wonders in my mind's imagination will usually be scaled down to lesser versions of themselves in order to mold into a general understanding. And that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. I've learned to expand myself creatively in other ways, and not in what I imagine but in the way I want to convey my art. If it means sharing with a different audience through an alternative outlet. Or even saying "
Fuck it
" and sharing it however I please. Either way, I'm challenging myself creatively by finding a balance between my work and my channels. It may not be how I originally hoped for, but it's still a method of growth and I'm willing to look like a fool doing so.
The thing is, imagination may make me a fool but I'd rather be a fool in a too-structured of a world than give up what abstract marvels my mind has spent building. I'd rather be several steps ahead of subjectivity than lose my special craft.
Photography by