I like to break up days and structure them. You have breakfast, work for two hours on a project, check your emails, work on another project for another two hours and then lunch. Your day has to be a measurable process, in order to minimize aimless drifting. Of course, you can have some days on automatic pilot, and there’s nothing wrong with drifting in and of itself. But you can’t do that every day—you’ll never get anywhere.

That night, I realized there are no warmups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Every day we're writing a few more words of a story. And when you die, it's not like “here lies Drew, he came in 174th place.” So from then on, I stopped trying to make my life perfect, and instead tried to make it interesting. I wanted my story to be an adventure — and that's made all the difference.

But part of practicing to me is actually an active enjoyment. When people ask, “How much do you practice and do you like practice?” Well, I think it’s always getting your mind to go from “I should” to “I want.” It’s like the magic button that only you can locate. When you’re doing the “should” thing, time happens very slowly. Ugh, I’ve been practicing forever! Fifteen minutes. But when you want to do something, an hour has passed. Your control of time depends on whether you should do something or whether you want to do something.

I've never set out to be a spokesperson for women's equality. My experience of working with Amelie Mauresmo gave me a small insight into attitudes to women in sport and, because it was unusual for a male tennis player to work with a female coach, I am often asked about that. Working with Amelie was, for me, because she was the right person for the job, and not a question of her sex at all. However, it became clear to me that she wasn't always treated the same as men in similar jobs, and so I felt I had to speak out about that.

So I don’t ever feel the urge to kind of rewrite the work.

When I start a project, it’s a kind of investigation and curiosity at the beginning. I’m basically culling materials. I’m gathering. A lot of the work takes on a collage aesthetic. So I am thinking through an idea and then gathering all of the supporting documents. In some ways it’s essayistic. I’m attempting to put forth an idea or a thesis. There are assertions that are being made, and what can I use visually, whether it is 16 millimeter film from the past or things that I shoot myself, whether it’s interview that I go out and get, whether it’s me painting on film and creating some sort of abstraction that alludes to or gestures towards the assertion. It’s playtime at the beginning. It’s almost like a very active brainstorming that requires me to go out and find materials as well as make notes, as well as look at footage as well as read. It’s investigative curiosity at the beginning, this phase of questioning and garnering. And at the end it’s instinctual. It’s a sweet spot. There have been times where I’ve gone out and presented something thinking that it’s done and then brought it back. I’ve gotten audience reactions, brought it back, turned it up a little bit, and then it was done. Sometimes my finishing process requires me to see it with a large group of people.

Certain people really aren’t getting their emails answered. Certain people are getting their emails answered at a very deliberate and delayed rate. There are certain things that I’m passing up that people think that I should be taking, jumping at and clapping over. There’s a certain amount of refusal happening right now because I’ve got to prioritize my health and my ancestral mandates.

One of my biggest disappointments: I used to take piano lessons as a young girl, and then I stopped, because I was having a really difficult year as a kid. My step father had died, and I didn't want to do anything -- so I just stopped taking lessons. And then I think back and I'm like, “Damn, I could have been Nina Simone!” Haha

So I’m listening, I’m watching, and I’m also reading while I’m making.

I’m calling people like Simone Leigh, Cauleen Smith—people who have sold things—asking, “What does this look like? What is this process?”