The Indirect Creative Process
Create powerful work by hiding the mechanics from the audience
The Indirect Creative Process is a method of creating work that produces powerful responses precisely because the mechanism is hidden from the audience. Rather than telling people what to feel or think, you design experiences that trigger those responses without the viewer being consciously aware of why they are reacting.
Teresita Fernandez described this as creating work where the viewer enters without awareness of why they are responding, making the experience completely universal, instinctive, experiential, personal, and emotional. Santiago Calatrava expressed a similar principle through architecture that captures sensation and expression rather than merely representing form. The audience does not need to know you were thinking about Pompeii; they just need to feel transformation, devastation, transition.
This approach requires deep technical mastery of your medium combined with psychological insight into how perception works. You must understand the mechanics well enough to hide them. The indirect approach is more powerful than the direct because it bypasses the audience's analytical defenses and speaks directly to their emotional and instinctual responses.
- The most powerful responses occur when the audience does not understand why they are reacting
- Hide the mechanics to bypass analytical defenses and reach emotional truth
- Make the viewer complicit in creating the experience rather than passively receiving it
- Technical mastery of your medium is prerequisite for achieving the indirect effect
- Universal emotional responses emerge when specific references are removed
- Master your medium at the technical levelBefore you can hide mechanics, you must understand them deeply. Study the materials, tools, and techniques of your craft until you can manipulate them with precision. Fernandez spent years understanding how different materials interact with light and perception.WarningDo not attempt the indirect approach before achieving genuine technical command. Without mastery, the work will simply be vague rather than powerfully indirect.
- Study how perception and emotion actually workUnderstand the psychology behind why people respond to certain stimuli. Ramachandran's work on aesthetic universals suggests there are principles of perception that transcend culture. Study these principles so you can design experiences that tap into them.Pro tipFernandez noted that color provokes visceral responses that stay completely abstract. Study which sensory channels bypass analytical thinking.
- Remove the explicit referenceTake your core concept or emotion and strip away the literal representation. If you are thinking about Pompeii, do not depict Pompeii. Instead, encode the feelings of transformation, devastation, and transition into abstract forms and materials that evoke those sensations without naming them.Pro tipWhen the audience has to supply their own interpretation, the experience becomes personal and therefore more powerful.
- Design for participation rather than observationCreate work that changes based on how the audience interacts with it. Fernandez creates pieces where the viewer's movement through space alters what they see. Calatrava designs buildings that respond to their environment. The audience becomes co-creator of the experience.
- Test for emotional resonance without explanationThe work succeeds when people respond emotionally without being able to articulate why. If viewers need an artist's statement or explanation to feel something, the indirect mechanism has failed. Test with people who have no context and observe their raw responses.Pro tipFernandez said her work only works if it evokes emotional response in the viewer. Make this your quality criterion.
Teresita Fernandez creates large-scale sculptures using unconventional materials like graphite, amber, and glass that interact with light to create immersive perceptual experiences. Viewers enter these environments and experience visceral emotional responses without understanding the mechanisms producing them. The work evokes feelings of transformation and transition without depicting any specific scene.
Santiago Calatrava designs buildings that capture sensation and expression rather than merely serving function. By studying how painters like Kirchner captured the drama of landscapes through abstraction rather than representation, he applies similar principles to architecture that communicates emotional messages through form, movement, and light.
Teresita Fernandez described how her sculptural work uses unconventional materials to create immersive environments that challenge conventional perception. She spoke about color as a means of provoking visceral responses that remain abstract, where the viewer sees a ghost of color rather than color itself. Her work with reflective and translucent materials creates effects where the viewer becomes complicit in generating the experience rather than passively receiving it.
Santiago Calatrava reinforced this principle from architecture, describing buildings as beacons of expression where the architect's personal perception gets encoded into structures that deliver their message for centuries. He spoke of studying Kirchner's paintings to understand how an artist captures sensation rather than representation, then applying that principle to buildings that move and breathe.