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Got back on my art bullshit at the weekend, after a long run of weeks in which I struggled to make the time.

I had to edit that line, from “find the time” to “make”. It’s a creativity-dogma cliche, perhaps, but cliches have a root in truth, and this is one of them: you’ll never find the time, you can only make it.

Perhaps it becomes easier to work in short bursts when the making of time has become more of a habit. There’s a thing I notice with collage that I also recognise from writing, though: a resistance to starting, because while you may have a vague idea of what you want to do, you can’t see the path that will get you there. To start is to run the possibility of setting out and getting fruitlessly lost.

Sometimes it is fruitless, of course—or perhaps there is fruit, but it is malformed and unripe. But if you keep going for long enough, something usually emerges. I tend to find that I’ll start doing something that feels rote and obvious, a formal or technical exercise at best, only to find that some by-product or accidental juxtaposition of the exercise starts becoming something more spontaneous.

This is particularly the case with collage—or maybe it’s just more obvious in that medium due to its reliance on happenstance and juxtaposition: two or three bits on the periphery of the thing you think you’re making suddenly announce that they are the essence of another thing entirely.

The big difference between collage and writing is that writing retains a plasticity and open-endedness: you can always rewrite, always edit, right up until the deadline (self-imposed or otherwise). With collage, it’s very hard to take back a decision—though sometimes you can quite literally paper over a move that, almost immediately, reveals itself to have been made in error.

But this is the exception, or at least that’s how it seems to me. Collage relies on an instinct for knowing when to stop. I think I ran past that point with this piece; the robot head was the important move, the perfect match of size that opened the door to the piece as a whole. The greeting screen came next, and I think it would have been wise to stop there before adding the other ephemera, which now feel heavy-handed and didactic, over-explanatory.

Selah. The work may be flawed, but half a day of flow-state fun is a result in itself I can think of many worse ways to spend a Sunday.