Living in Seattle gives me plenty of opportunities to walk along the beaches looking at rocks and worn beach logs. During these quiet walks close to home I found inspiration from the "vessels" created in beach logs. The best part was finding small treasures in these vessels and seeing how the treasures would affect the space and change the space over time. Where you could see a pebble had formed a larger hole with its existence was magical for me. It also visually imagined a space I might have within myself for the things that I've come to carry within me over my lifetime. What if they created similarly beautiful vessels inside of me? The metaphor for these visual vessels was a huge ah-ha moment for me. Over the next few months, it stimulated a deep internal conversation about how we carry things, and how healing it can be to physically hold an object that serves as a talisman of them.

At the time that I created this collection, I was new to the full-time artist gig. I'd been working a day job for several years while building this business.  Leaving my day job generated space for me to be more deeply intentional with the time I spent creating. In the past, I was always in a hurry and my thoughts, and the robustness of the collection seemed underdeveloped. For this collection, I took a solo retreat so I could have quiet intentional time with my thoughts and at my bench creating. 

The balancing act of motherhood, family life, and small business ownership is complex and full of surprises. Add a day job to that and you’ll find you’re juggling many balls at once.

I was lost in the midst of this fragmented life when I created the Fragment Collection. I felt I was often headed one way only to find that I needed to re-route and shift gears, again and again. I never felt like I was giving everything my all or my best and I was frustrated. There wasn’t a whole lot I could change at the time - except my perspective.

This collection was born from physical manifestations of my thoughts surrounding this maze of life. I needed to shift my perspective and choose to find joy instead of fear and resistance in that current situation. The patterns were inspired by the rhythms that could center my mind, like the ebb and flow of water, or the way that looking up to the city skyline yields a juxtaposition of beautiful angles that were never a part of the original plan.

At the time that I created this collection, I had a lot of feelings about everything and felt like I was swimming. I couldn't connect the dots between the imagery I had produced and my thoughts. I met a friend for coffee and she wrote in her notebook as I shared my fragmented thoughts with her (above). What she wrote tied it all together for me. She wrote, "accepting the whole" - life. And it spun my perspective. I realized I was creating bits and pieces of the things that made me feel grounded, and brought me back to the center.

Through my own internal work during the making of this collection, I began a practice of choosing gratitude instead of frustration, calling attention to the greatness of myself and my ability to do all the things I was doing even if they weren’t perfect, and honoring the fact that even though this track wasn’t the way I had hoped that when I look for it, it comes full circle - at the end of the day my family loves me, we have a roof over our heads and we are healthy.

We are beholden to where we are right here and now. It’s my hope that the pieces in this collection will serve as gentle pushes for you to shift your perspective and see the greatness in your life, to find beauty in where you are right now, even when it’s not what you planned for, and perhaps feels incredibly fragmented. Even if it’s just in really small minute moments - there is beauty there.

Experiences have a way of showing you what’s important, what’s needed, when to begin. In the early summer of 2015 I was given some health news that was scary and emotionally charged. There were a lot of unknowns, many Dr. visits, and big words like cancer and a potential no more children. I ended up having dual surgery to remove a CANTALOUPE-sized ovarian cyst with my right ovary, and my gall bladder.

A stroke of good fortune came during the tail end of my recovery and my husband was asked to go to Kauai for a work project. We jumped on the opportunity to go while I was recovering. If I could recover on the couch I could surely recover on a towel in the sand!

Emotionally my whole soul needed the trip, but so did my family. The experience was hard on us all. Thinking about my future with the words' cancer and no more children floating around was scary and painful. I became swallowed up and closed off by those swirling thoughts and emotions.

Until this trip, I hadn't realized how devoid of emotion and connection I was. The soothing sound of the water and the sun on my skin made me feel alive again. Kauai brought me back into myself and my fears were stripped away. Everything became brighter and more lush. My emotions were stronger. And I began to see images and shapes in everything. My new work showed its face through the peace I felt.

Upon returning from Kauai, I gathered images that were visually captivating not just for their subjects but for their composition and interest.

I took these images and broke them down into lines and shapes, and then from there, I formed pieces that harnessed the feelings and shapes within the images. I cut the shapes in paper and played with them until I was happy.

Once the cardboard shapes were satisfactory I carved them in wax and added textural details. The images below were 3 of the primary images I used to create these shapes. The photo with the red line is an example of how I truncated the images into line and shape. This image became the HORIZON earrings.