Creativity is Just Connecting Things

Steve Jobs said something that has always stayed with me.

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it — they just saw something. It'll seem obvious to them after a while."

I think about this a lot. Because it describes exactly what happens when I'm working well.

It Doesn't Come from Nowhere

People sometimes say things to me like: "I don't know how you come up with ideas." Or: "I'm just not creative."

And I understand why it feels that way from the outside. But creativity isn't some mysterious gift that some people have and others don't. It's a practice of noticing, storing, and connecting.

Every piece I make has a lineage. A colour combination I noticed in a market. A botanical illustration from a book I found at a secondhand shop. A garden I walked through in the rain. A fabric I couldn't stop touching. None of these are the idea. But they're all the raw material.

The idea comes from connecting them.

You can read more about how this plays out in my studio on the Art Behind the Brand page — it's where I share the thinking and values behind every collection I make.

What You Look at Matters

The more diverse your visual diet, the more you have to connect.

I've always read widely and looked at a lot of things that have nothing to do with each other — textile history, architecture, botanical science, vintage packaging, indigenous art, contemporary ceramics. Not because I'm studying them. Just because they're interesting to me.

And over time, connections form. A colour palette from a piece of Japanese ceramics shows up in how I think about a native flower. A repeat pattern structure from a 1960s fabric influences the way I arrange a still life. I'm not copying any of it. I'm connecting it.

This is why spending time in nature matters so much to my practice. Australian native botanicals — proteas, waratahs, banksias, gum blossoms — are endlessly rich as visual source material. You can see how that connection has worked its way through my botanical wall art and collections like Flowers of Oz and Protea Magnifica.

Building Your Visual Vocabulary

One of the most practical things you can do as an artist is to actively build your visual vocabulary. Keep a sketchbook. Photograph things that catch your eye. Collect images, textures, colour combinations, patterns. Not to copy them — to absorb them.

Over time you start to develop a personal visual library that is entirely yours. The references you draw from. The things that consistently stop you. The colours you keep coming back to.

This library is what you connect from. And because no one else has had exactly your combination of experiences — your travels, your reading, your childhood, your obsessions — the connections you make will always be unique to you.

This is also why finding your artistic style isn't something you can force. It emerges naturally from the accumulated connections you make over time. You can't rush it. But you can feed it — by looking widely, noticing deliberately, and showing up to the creative practice consistently.

The Connection is the Creative Act

This is what Jobs meant, I think. That creative people are good at seeing relationships between things that others experience as separate. It's not that they have access to something no one else does. It's that they've trained themselves — or simply allowed themselves — to notice.

You can do this too.

Start paying attention to what draws your eye. What colours stop you. What shapes feel satisfying. What combinations make you feel something. Write it down, photograph it, sketch it. Build up a visual vocabulary that's entirely yours.

Then let it do its work. The connections will come — and they'll be yours alone, because no one else has had exactly your combination of experiences.

That's what makes creative work individual. Not talent. The specific, unrepeatable collection of things you've noticed and the way only you can connect them.

Warmly, Kirsten x