Secrecy as Creative Freedom

Secrecy used to mean distance. Something closed or inaccessible.
Now it feels almost necessary.

We live in a time where everything asks to be explained immediately. Ideas are shared while still forming. Processes are documented before they are understood. The pressure to reveal often arrives before the work knows what it wants to become.

I have never found creativity comfortable in that condition.

When I was working as a sculptor, the studio existed outside of conversation. Not hidden, just protected. A place where uncertainty could remain unresolved for as long as needed. Some days nothing made sense. That was part of the work.

Perfumery brought back the same feeling. A fragrance begins quietly, without language. Early explanations only reduce it. Too many opinions give it direction before it discovers its own logic. What matters most happens before anything can be shown.

Secrecy allows time. Time for instinct to move without interruption. Time for doubt. Time for decisions that cannot be justified yet.

It is not about withholding. It is about allowing something to grow without being observed too closely.

Freedom, for me, is not the ability to share everything.
It is the ability to wait.

When a work finally appears, it carries that period of invisibility within it. You may not recognize it consciously, but you feel it. A certain density. A quiet confidence.

Something that was allowed to exist on its own before entering the world.

(The building in the photograph stands at 135 Plymouth Street in DUMBO, Brooklyn. It once faced the river directly, before landfill extended the shoreline and the neighborhood transformed into a destination for the world. My second studio occupied the top corner floor, looking out over the East River, the two Bridge, and the Manhattan skyline, the Twin Towers still present. The view felt unreal. There was no heat on the floor, even through one of the coldest Decembers on record, around 1988.)