A friend of mine recently confessed his frustration. He’s a gardener by trade but a sculptor at heart. He spends his days pruning, planting, and mowing – and by the time he gets home, he’s too tired to make art in his garage. His hands ache for clay, but all they seem to hold are secateurs.

I listened, and then I thought of Salvador Dalí.

Dalí, the great surrealist known for melting clocks and impossible dreams, once made a simple foil sculpture. It’s not what he’s famous for, but it reveals something essential: art isn’t confined to marble, canvas, or studio walls. Dalí brought his imagination – his surrealist instinct – to something as ordinary as a crumpled sheet of foil. The material didn’t matter. The act of creation did.

I told my friend this: perhaps your gardening isn’t separate from your sculpture. Perhaps it is sculpture. The same principles apply – shaping, layering, balancing form and texture. A topiary bush is just clay with roots. The garden bed is a landscape of lines and negative space. Even the rhythm of the work – kneeling, cutting, raking – can be an embodied kind of artistry.

It reminds me of a principle from martial arts: Zhan Zhuang, or “standing like a tree.” It’s a meditative discipline that looks like stillness but builds immense internal strength. Before a martial artist can deliver a powerful kick, they must first master how to stand. Every spin and strike flows from the discipline of balance.

In the same way, maybe the artist’s job isn’t always to produce, but to practise standing – to find balance between labour and art, between function and form. Gardening, sculpting, meditating – they’re all acts of shaping the world, whether through soil, metal, or silence.

So perhaps the trick isn’t to fight the work that pays the bills, but to see it differently. To find the art already rooted in your daily gestures. To stand like a tree and let creation grow from where you already are.