Maybe these lofty claims about the imagination are yet more artistic hubris, a further place to hide, like the office – another invented way to separate ourselves from the world. My sacred space became the rolling fire of the imagination.īut, you know, these days, I wonder about this too. The sacred space, for the artist, is within the creative flow, at the crucial and fiery point of artistic intention, where time suddenly contracts and the work finds its power and its groove.

I came to understand that the sacred space is the imagination itself, or rather the time spent inside the actual idea – the song you are composing, the story you are writing, or the picture you are painting. Handing it over was one of the things that allowed me to find my way back to the world. My office is currently in Montreal as it travels the world with the exhibition.

In 2019 I gave my office – the desk and the entire contents – to the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen for the very beautiful Stranger Than Kindness – The Nick Cave Exhibition. But in time this office, my retreat, started to become a place of exclusion or of hiding, a place where I could turn away from the world, under the guise of being creative, at the expense of all else.

This office, with its massive desk, typewriter, shelves of books, and its accumul ated piles of artefacts and self-absorbed scribblings, I considered to be my ‘sacred space’, a fortress where I could shut the door and lock out the world. For most of my creative life I did indeed maintain an office at home.

Redhand files