I refer to myself as a generalist.
The main aspect of this for me is simply having an interest in following a variety of creative and intellectual threads. I’m curious about where one thing connects with another and either forms a delicate lacework or becomes tied into impenetrable knots.
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I recently ran into the phrase “niche down”.
I mostly saw the phrase in reference to the successful building of an individualized career and audience. The idea being that by finding a self-defining niche, you can gather interested people to you more readily. I don’t know where this first came from but it’s clearly not a new idea — I’m just relatively good at avoiding jargon.
My generalist inclination also rejects the idea that I should narrow focus and specialize. I would rather tend to a garden of interconnected niches. To mix my metaphors from the threads I said I followed a few sentences ago, generalist creative practice can be like working within a diverse garden with its multitudes of life forms, cycles, seasons, and connections.
There are many niches to inhabit and they have pathways between them. Some pathways are uniform and predictable and others wind and diverge in unexpected ways.
Niches can also have a variety of scales and scopes. Within a garden, growing flowers or growing vegetables are vast niches of knowledge, experience, and phenomena that also have a dense set of interconnections between them. And of course there are sub-niches all the way down as gardeners cultivate their interest in specific forms, varieties, hybridizations, and methodologies.
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My creative exploration might start with broad niches like: drawing, photography, music, or design.
These all have so much breadth of scope that they are packed with multiple lifetimes of sub-niches. It is exciting working within and between those niches and even finding those that interest, excite, or challenge me most.
I don’t need to be a designer that draws or a musician that takes photos. I can slip between things, gathering and sewing along the way.
I love that something I read might inform a drawing or that notes from a piano could connect me better to a moving image.
There is also the selectivity of a neurodivergent brain at play in all of this.
My mind thrives on associations, connectivity, and curious acquisition but also quite easily bores and wants to skip steps, leap between things, or ignore more obvious connections. My long and short term memory and my present imaginative mind can be an interesting mix of vivid and blank.
Niches are like rabbit holes. Some are new and shallow and others deep and branching.
We enter rabbit holes unsure where we might end up — maybe even confident that the path will have unexpected turns and even dead ends. We want a niche to be more like a labyrinth than a walled garden.
So… backing up to the concept of “niche down”.
I don’t doubt that people can find forms of success by limiting what they produce or are known for. It is easier to develop word of mouth or network effect benefits if more people can know “what they are getting”. That just feels antithetical to why I want to make artwork.
Art for me is not knowing what might come next. Predictably of form and content may build “brand” but my brain and heart don’t work that way.
I’d rather noodle and be messy and fumble sometimes. It doesn’t always feel good but sometimes it can be joyous or at least like a release.
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Discover your niche and then the next niche and the next…