It’s funny. Before, it used to be that I’d travel somewhere. I always had a storyline, some kind of grounding element. I used to go somewhere and just take over a space and go find things and find elements. That was how I used to do it. But since I had Cyrus I’ve had to do things only in the studio and shift it, so it’s very different for me now. I’m constantly writing in my book and coming up with things, mostly from things I read. I have all these ideas and I just write them and then some make it out. Most of them don’t. I was reading [Jorge Luis] Borges’ Labyrinths about six months ago. That really spoke to me, and that’s when I started doing the [painting series titled] Endless Sunsets. It’s like a labyrinth, something you can never get out of and there’s really no point in it, a brain maze kind of thing.

Concepts can be really freeing in their limitations. I really enjoy when I make rules for myself in my creative practice. Whether that means I’m going to try and write a song without the use of the word “I,” I like having rules in my songs. Even if I don’t follow them exactly, it’s kind of nice to have a very loose guideline. And then when I try to create that universe for myself, I at least can visualize the path that I’m trying to follow.

I think it’s a combination of being a good listener, trying to understand what lies beneath the surface. And I mean that in the most literal sense.  It could be a cultural institution. It could be an enterprise. It could be a site. It could be the culture of feng shui in an Asian society. The things that you can measure and the things that you can’t measure. And it’s about drawing on the best of diverse skills, the reality that an architect cannot design and realize a building independent of engineers, skilled engineers, structural engineers, environmental engineers. So for me, it’s about harnessing the creative energies. It’s not about designing a building and handing it out and saying, “You make it stand up. You make it warm. You make it cool.” It’s about getting those skills in unison.  The analogy is perhaps a round table, which is non-hierarchical. That doesn’t mean to say that you don’t have strong leadership. Obviously, you have to have that; otherwise, it’s designed by committee. So it’s answering the material needs and providing an element of surprise, something that perhaps nobody believed might be possible to add. And it’s not about money. Quality is an attitude of mind. It’s not about how much you spend. It’s about how wisely you spend. You’ve really got three ingredients. You’ve got material resources, money; you’ve got time, and in many cases, time is money; and you’ve got creative energy. And it’s the creative energy that is going to make the difference in terms of those other ingredients.

Obviously, it’s different for everyone. And actually there is a difference for each thing I do. But one way it happens is to just move. [ laughs ] I mean, obviously, you don’t just sort of randomly throw yourself around the room. You move with these ideas and sometimes I find that I’ve already got images in my head that I imagine my body in, or sometimes I have sequences in my head. I think a lot of time I’m listening to what comes next because sometimes the body will tell you that. Often I don’t document it too early in the process because sometimes if you forget stuff it’s worth knowing that the things that you forget maybe weren’t worth keeping. The things that have settled are the things that need to be kept because they seem most urgent. I don’t know. I mean, sometimes it’s about going to the studio and nothing happens for a long time and you just sit there and you’re not feeling it. That’s awful. It’s like when you’re writing and sometimes you go to the coffee shop and you’re like, “So, we’ll just see what happens.” And you end up on Facebook. I think the answer to this is… I really think the answer to this is I don’t know. [ laughs ]