This morning, while reading, something shifted for me. I’ve been thinking about intuition and reason, and about how they show up in my own work and life, and it dawned on me that I may have been listening to the wrong part of myself.

I’ve spent years calling myself a conceptual artist. That label has served me well and still does. At the same time, I was raised in a house-building family. I think in three dimensions. I notice weight, balance, form relationships, and what happens when something is placed where it doesn’t belong. Most of my work begins there, long before I can explain it to anyone.

What struck me this morning is how often the explanation comes later.

Jonathan Haidt’s image of the Rider and the Elephant helped me see this more clearly. The Elephant stands in for intuition—our fast, bodily sense of what feels right, dangerous, promising, or just feels right in the gut. The Rider represents reasoning: the part that explains, justifies, plans, and persuades. What resonated for me is the idea that the Elephant usually moves first, and the Rider follows, making sense of where we’ve already gone.

When I look back at my own work, this rings true. The decisions that mattered most didn’t come out of analysis. They came from a sense of orientation—of how people would move through a space, how a system might behave over time, how living things would respond. The reasoning helped later, especially when I needed to communicate with institutions, write grants, or frame the work historically. But it wasn’t the source.

Another idea that stayed with me this morning is shared intentionality. It’s not a phrase most people use, but the experience is familiar. It’s what happens when a small group aligns around a task or a situation without needing much instruction. Dinners with friends, long conversations in the studio, bar conversations where something clicks and my way of seeing shifts—these moments have always mattered to me, even when I didn’t quite know why.

Seen through this lens, they aren’t just social or supportive. They’re moments when attention and intention are shared, when people sense the same thing at the same time and adjust themselves accordingly.

This helped me rethink how I see myself.

My primary intelligence may be intuitive and spatial, shaped by materials, bodies, and systems. Concepts help me make that intelligence legible to others, and sometimes to myself, but they aren’t where the work starts—at least not for me, and not where it will land or how it will be understood.

What changes when I see it this way is subtle but important. I feel less pressure to justify every move in advance. I feel more trust in building conditions and letting meaning emerge from how people and materials interact. I also feel a renewed interest in gatherings and shared situations, not as supplements to the work, but as part of the work itself.

It also helps me understand why I had to make work like The Toy Globe and The Pediment Piece. At the time, I could explain them and even defend them, but that didn’t make them good. Some of that work was simply bad art. What mattered was what it showed me: how easily explanation can get ahead of intuition, and how easy it is to fool yourself when the rider grabs the reins too early.

Where I find myself now feels different. Mornings I read. Then I move into the day: sometimes I pick up the memoirs, sometimes I work with the community and friends. That rhythm sparks ideas. I test them with my AI, then bring them back to the group. Some of them take on a life of their own.

So it isn’t just looking back. It’s just as much looking forward—better informed by good books, good friends, and ideas that have been worked a bit before they land. There’s a sense of movement in it, a loop that keeps feeding itself.

This is a good day.