Creativity Begins by Listening to What Wants to Be Made

Rose Simpson describes her formation in Santa Clara Pueblo as a life in which art was not set apart as a professional category or museum-bound activity. Making was how a household fed itself, housed itself, expressed itself, and stayed in relation to place.

Debbie Millman frames the opening question around art as “a kind of language for survival,” pointing to Simpson’s mother, Roxanne Swentzell, and grandmother as artists who united making and meaning. Simpson answers by returning to the practical and inherited nature of the work.

Everything, Simpson says, was a creative process. Everything had application, intention, and meaning. Swentzell inherited generations of ceramic knowledge and used it as both communication and livelihood. She supported the family through sculpture, but the same capacity to “craft earth” also made the family’s eating vessels, helped build their home, and supported growing food. The “art world,” in that context, appeared strange because the practice was already embedded in ordinary life.

That early household was experimental by design. Simpson has described her childhood home this way; one example was her mother turning off the electricity to see how the family would adapt. Simpson remembers the practical irritation of needing to catch a 6:30 a.m. bus without power, but frames the experiment as part of her mother’s continuing search for how to “root” life in relationship to earth and being.

The family grew its own food and pursued the possibility of living “completely sustainably.” Simpson stresses the specific conditions that made this possible: the privilege of living in an ancestral home, seed adapted to the high desert environment over a long period, spirituality connected to farming, and tradition capable of supporting life in northern New Mexico. Turning off the electricity was, in her words, “one step towards remembering what it's like to not be dependent on a system.”

The experiment changed her sensory life. Simpson says that because of the electricity being turned off, homeschooling, and growing food, she can now hear electricity. She describes herself as sensitive to the systems people add to their lives and then normalize. Removing them reveals “how much we're affected by it.”

For Simpson, self-reliance is not simply competence. It is a condition for agency. Her mother homeschooled Simpson and her brother early on; they chose school later, and Simpson says “now we keep going to school.” The point was not rejection of institutions as such, but the building of a capacity to choose. If people are taught sustainability and innovation, if they learn how to survive under varied conditions, then they are not merely acted upon by the world around them.

That logic extends beyond food, shelter, and schooling into her later work across ceramics, metal, automotive restoration, performance, installation, education, and public appearance. Simpson says she sustains self-reliance by remembering that she does not need many of the things she thinks she needs. Once something is understood as a choice rather than a necessity, “it doesn't rule me, it doesn't own me.” The art world, car culture, education, and even the choice to be present for the conversation become relationships she can actively enter, rather than systems that determine her.

Rose Simpson’s account of car culture is not a detour from the ceramics and public sculpture. It is part of the same claim about applied aesthetics: lived environments, vehicles, food, homes, and daily gestures can carry intention and meaning when people make aesthetic decisions in relation to them.

Her answer about car culture begins with humor and specificity. Simpson liked the “Fast and Furious” films at one point; “Gone in 60 Seconds” is “my jam.” But the deeper source is Española, New Mexico, where Simpson grew up. She describes the town as adjacent to, and effectively sandwiched between, Santa Clara Pueblo and Ohkay Owingeh, with youth culture shaped by Indigenous communities and local Hispanic communities together. Lowriders and cholo culture were part of the social field she grew up in.

Her childhood memory of cars is tied to aspiration and aesthetics. Her mother had a 1952 Willys truck used to build the family home. There was no room for the children in the front, so Simpson rode in the truck bed as her mother drove into town at a maximum of about 40 miles an hour. Simpson remembers watching “all the nice cars” pile up behind them and thinking: “when I grow up I'm gonna have a nice car.”

That did happen. Simpson says she has built two custom cars for herself “in order to have an aesthetic experience.” One of the works presented in relation to that claim is Bosque, from 2025: a white classic car painted with geometric black, white, and red patterns, parked on an empty road at dusk. The on-screen credit attributes the work to Rose B. Simpson, with courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Jessica Silverman in San Francisco, Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, and photographer Kate Russell.

The phrase “aesthetic experience” is central. Simpson uses “relational aesthetics” to describe what she was trying to create. In graduate school, she studied what Indigenous aesthetic might mean and found the closest written framework in Japanese aesthetics: “aesthetics of the everyday,” intentionality in ordinary action, and applied aesthetics in the lived environment.

The Española cruise line on Sunday becomes her concrete example. People get into their nice cars, play music, lean back, become present, enjoy community, feel self-worth, watch the sunset, and get a drink from Sonic. To Simpson, that feeling is not frivolous display. It is presence. It is the return of aesthetic decision-making to lived experience. In making those choices, she says, people enter “a state of agency” and “empowerment.”

This is why the custom car matters as much as the ceramic figure or public installation. Simpson is not trying to move aesthetic life only into an art space. She describes an applied Indigenous aesthetic as something available in life, not “in a white cube on a white box in some other building somewhere” where access is not guaranteed.

Her multidisciplinary practice follows from this orientation. Simpson says that even if she stopped “being an artist in the way that the world is art-ing,” she would still be making things constantly. She describes herself as a dreamer who is always imagining “the next best thing.” She looks at a window and thinks it should be somewhere else; she looks at a car and sees what it could be; she looks at a garden and sees what it could become. Then she begins.

The satisfaction is not only formal. It lies in listening to the world, asking how to be of service to it, doing the work, and stepping back to see transformation. Simpson describes that as applied aesthetic, not only outwardly but inwardly: an investigation of psychological and spiritual space.

For Rose Simpson, “vessel” is a serious category. She has called cars vessels, and she has also described her sculptural figures as vessels for transformation. Asked what these vessels hold, Simpson answers with one word: “Consciousness.”

Her explanation resists reducing the vessel to symbolism. Simpson says she herself is a vessel: aware, moving, and making intentional decisions in the world. Her ceramic vessels are hollow inside, but they are also “watching,” “doing work,” and independent. In her language, they “make their own decisions” and move through the world “with a job to do.” The same is true, she says, of cars, houses, and inhabited spaces. They are watching and listening, and “making decisions if we are aware.”

This view depends on a practice of asking and waiting. Simpson says the first step toward awareness is to ask, then wait for an answer. She argues that people have overbuilt the internal muscle of prioritizing human interaction and have stopped understanding and believing that they can communicate with “that which is beyond human.”

Her anthropomorphized ceramic vessels are intended as bridges. Because humans “really like to talk to other humans,” a face can open the possibility of relation. If a viewer sees an anthropomorphized face and begins feeling and listening, Simpson hopes that person can begin building a communicative muscle with what has been deemed inanimate.

The works presented around this idea make the argument visible without relying on naturalistic completeness. In studio documentation for Strata from 2024, Simpson works on a large clay head. Seed, from 2022, appears as tall, rusted metal figures arranged in a circle in an outdoor plaza or park area. Related works, including The Eyes of Seed and Daughter 3, emphasize faces, eyes, markings, and sensory presence.

The open eyes in Simpson’s work are deliberate. So are the mouths, whether open or closed. Simpson says that when she makes figurative work, she does not always include elements she considers unnecessary, such as arms or hair. But the figures have senses: ears, nose, mouth, and eyes. She wants them to have “what they need to soak in the world around them” and to create relationship with it. Viewers, seeing those sensory capacities, may understand that the works are sensing them as well.

The making itself includes acknowledgement. When Simpson cuts eyes into clay for the first time, she says hello: “Welcome.”

Debbie Millman connects Rose Simpson’s account to Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act and Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk, both invoked by Millman as examples of artists being vessels for creative communication and creativity coming through the artist. Simpson agrees “totally.” Her own account of the process is tied to attention, place, and service.

For a public art piece, Simpson says, she must go to the place and sit there. She asks: “What needs to be here? What needs to be told? What story needs to be manifested here to make change? And how can I be of service?” Then she waits and listens.

Millman presses on whether the answer always comes. Simpson says it comes “real fast.” She compares the process to tuning into truth: “there's only truth and when you're in alignment with it, it's like you just tuned into it and boom, you found it.” The next step is work: “okay, time to get started.”

That same approach shaped her relationship with a 1985 Chevy El Camino named Maria. When Simpson first painted the car, she made it satin black with a gloss clear coat, intended to evoke traditional pottery. After bringing it home, she sat on the porch in a folding chair, looked at the car, and felt that the work had not originated in her ego. “I didn't do this,” she says. “She used me to make her into what she was always meant to be and I just listened.” For Simpson, the proper response was gratitude: thanking the car for choosing her to participate in its becoming.

The artist still has a role. Simpson turns to a teaching language she uses with students: “don't yuck my yum.” For her, aesthetic judgment begins when people let go of their thoughts and find their “yum.” But even that first pleasure may not be final. If one sits with it long enough, what seemed to be the right thing may shift.

She describes aesthetic refinement as a process of tuning: refining and refining until it “clicks.” The adjustment may be minute — “actually just to the left” — but the body knows when the relation is right. Millman connects this back to self-reliance: trusting one’s sense and judgment depends on having developed that internal capacity. Simpson agrees and calls it “a muscle” that must be built.

Creativity, as Simpson describes it, is not merely a force passing through a passive person. She speaks of truth arriving quickly, of objects choosing her, and of listening to what wants to become; she also says the capacity to hear, trust, and refine has to be developed. It requires agency, discipline, and the ability to sit long enough for the aesthetic signal to become precise.

Rose Simpson’s account of animacy, the soul of things, and the blurred line between making and being returns finally to silence. The silence she hopes her work leaves behind is not empty. It is “full of information.”

The phrase is consistent with the rest of her account: silence is not absence, emptiness, or withdrawal. It is a condition in which other forms of relation become audible.

She adds one practical qualification: her pieces are quiet “unless they're a 410 horsepower 350 going really fast.” That exception matters because it keeps the argument from becoming conventionally serene. The lowrider, the ceramic figure, the public sculpture, the house, and the garden all participate in the same field of attention, but they do not all communicate in the same register.

Strata gives this closing idea a visual form: a tall ceramic figure with beaded necklaces and a white geometric structure rising from its head, first shown in detail against a slatted wooden wall and then installed in a large, airy interior. Simpson’s final statement is concise: in that silence, “there's connection.”