Writing requires an outside awareness. It demands that you understand what is unraveling at your feet with a clarity that you can re-share. I would say that I have had moments of intense visceral clarity, and I have had moments of being in a floating space. Where one moment intertwines into the next, reverses and moves again in a non-linear way. It has felt like a second and years. It has been charged and vacant. To catch everyone up, I have lost both parents in the last year and a half, two unplanned deaths and no time to prepare really, 19 days for my mother and 60 for my father after receiving the same bad news of Cancer, different hiding spaces, same story. They were champions of me living a creative life. I have moments where I am still reaching for the phone to share good news...
Simultaneously, I opened my dream creative space that I have been planning and preparing for my whole life, in quiet and loud ways. My father and I tearing up standing in the middle of the floor when I showed him the key. I did it Dad. We did it. It was Mom really. The last thing demanded of me was to live a brave life. This is what that looks like to me. It will be ArtWRKD's one year anniversary on September 16th and as typical of the last eight months, I don't know where the time has gone but I also feel I have been shaping every second of it. I started a memoir. I started a business. I started healing. I started sharing. I started to be incredibly present. I started to uncover and recover and uncover again.
Healing is grimy. As an artist it has forced me to really look at my work. How am I connecting through it. What story am I telling. Have I even begun? I can say I haven't. I can say through writing I have touched the sharp tip but what about my wearable art. I curate others work for stories. I curate for emotive pieces that force a conversation. So I am looking at that. I am evolving through that. It will make me the type of artist I want to be. It might not make me popular, but I have never really cared much for that.
I am enamored with the ArtWRKD space and the community it has fostered. I am moved so completely by these artists I help serve. I have so much more to do and so many plans. I am thrilled that you all have opened your hearts and minds and creative lives to this space. Year two will be big. Big energy, big love, big experiences, big community. Year two I will still be sifting through the grime of healing, but I will still be living a creative life. The one I was born to live. The one I hope to support for others.
Wishing everyone a life of grace, surrounded by creative
possibility.
