Rethinking overthinking, creative process, and what actually makes the work?

I used to think the hardest part of being an artist was making the work.


It turns out, it’s everything around it. The thinking. The doubting. The starting again and again. 

If I’m honest, the real challenge has been negotiating with what I call my “monkey brain”. It sounds playful, but more often it feels like utter chaos. For years, I tried to quiet it. To sit still, focus, push through. It’s never really worked.

Lately, I’ve started to wonder if that constant movement, the circling, the questioning, the overthinking, isn’t actually the process itself? Something in me always observing, sorting, and rearranging?

One of my first art teachers once said to me, “Only you see the world this way.” At the time, it felt vague. Slightly irritating, maybe even a little patronising. 

Now I think perhaps I understand. We don’t make work from skill alone. We make it from attention. From what we notice and what we return to. That’s the part that quietly shapes everything.

I often find myself drawn to architectural lines. Not whole buildings, but fragments. Edges. Structures. There’s something in their rhythm and order that pulls me in. Through collage, using found images, cutting and reconfiguring, something begins to take shape. Not a building exactly, but more of an ‘internal architecture’.

Last year, I worked on The Things You Notice series, exploring repetition, sequence and pattern recognition. The rhythm of breath. The geometry of man made structures. And then I got stuck. That familiar place where nothing resolves and everything starts to feel forced. So I went back to something familiar. I painted a flower. (There is always a flower quietly waiting somewhere in the background). 

This new body of work, still unnamed and still forming, feels like a continuation. Not entirely different, but shifting. A return to pattern and structure, but loosened and opened up. Reassembled through collage into something less certain, but more alive.

I’m trying to let things take time. To allow the work to remain unresolved a little longer. To stay with ideas rather than rushing to finish them. Because not everything needs to become something.

Sometimes the work is simply a way of thinking. A way of paying attention. And the way you notice the world is the part that quietly shapes everything.

Nicola Bouwer is a Johannesburg-based contemporary South African artist working in figurative collage and oil painting. She creates works from her studio at August House.