The Polish artist Monika Sosnowska wrote of her discovery of sculpture as the medium that could best articulate the ideas she wanted to express was the realisation that the “painting started to escape her canvas.”

It’s a lovely description of the energy that a slip can cause, where the space you trap your ideas into begins to dissolve.

Getting into a state of ambivalence about boundaries sounds a lot like not giving a toss, potentially leaning into not caring, and so giving up. 

But having dismissed an article titled ‘Embracing Ambivalence’ to which a wit might reply ‘I’d embrace ambivalence but frankly I can’t be bothered,’ discovering Sosnowska’s work made me think again about the strength of fluidity. Of not being so ‘made-up-my-mindedness.' 

And while strength=fluidity might sound even more contradictory than getting close to your inner, erm, ambival, there’s definitely a sense (at least) I have that while others talk about ‘flow’ (and being right on the path that leads to discovery), fluidity seems to harness the idea of ambivalence-as-escape - and something much more powerful for creativity. 

Losing focus, chopping about, tacking this way and that, and not getting so fixed on the fix-ed-ness of a thing, that seems like good place to drift off too find answers and make odd connections between things that wouldn’t have found themselves together (which as a designer, is really what you should be best at doing.) 

There’s a great track ‘Be like water, my friend’, a riff on Bruce Lee’s musings by Chris Lorenzo. Twitch the ‘w’ word and presto-change-o, we discover the edges suddenly shift away in all kinds of new directions.

Ambivalence. You should give it a try, even if you can’t be arsed.