When I started cleaning my art studio space last week, it was overwhelming.
Art supplies scattered everywhere. Unfinished pieces laying on various surfaces. My room had slowly become the catch-all for the rest of the house.
There was a pile of my daughter’s old clothes — worn out, well loved — that I keep telling myself I’ll turn into a quilt someday. When that someday will be, I don’t know.
A larger piece sat leaning against the wall, one I started last year and never finished. I began it before my uncle passed away, and I haven’t been able to return to it since. Maybe this year I will. I suppose.
Then there’s the yarn.
Let’s talk about my yarn addiction.
I learned how to crochet a few years ago and have accumulated several skeins, tucked away in storage bags. Every time I see them, my mind fills with ideas — a blanket, a scarf, a cardigan, maybe even one of those 1970s crochet pillows with the button in the center. The kind my grandmother had on her couch.
I have no shortage of ideas. Translating them from my mind to my hands is where I struggle.
Or maybe it’s the overwhelm — the abundance of projects competing for attention. Sewing. Crochet. Clay. Watercolor. Markers. Pen and ink. Paint. Even my daughter’s old Play-Doh makes me pause and think… what could I make with that?
As I moved through the room, a theme started to emerge.
I don’t like throwing things away. I like to use them. Transform them. Let them become something else.
And then I found the sketchbooks.
A pile tucked under my art desk, filled with work from twenty years ago. Sketches scattered between poems I wrote while trying to understand where I was in life at the time. Reading them again, I realized the meaning still lands. I still recognize myself in the words.
Some sketches held sadness. Some carried memories of abuse — the kind of weight that doesn’t disappear just because time passes. I’ve come to understand that much of my work stems from that, subconsciously.
Pain like that freezes a part of you. It leaves you suspended in time. You grieve the version of yourself that existed before it — before the silence you learned to sit in for survival.
Art became more than expression. It became survival itself.
I’ve always struggled to explain my work when people ask what style I create. Sometimes I want to say, “my style.” Sometimes I don’t want to define it at all.
I just like to be.
To process.
To communicate in ways that don’t need to be spelled out.
Through tone. Contrast. Layers.
Emotion.
