I've been an artist since the day I was born - perhaps even before if you believe in past lives, like I do. My mother is an artist, so my childhood was rich in experimentation and play. The kitchen table was always ready to accommodate big lumps of clay, tubes of paint, inks, pens and the myriad found objects we'd collect from long days spent in the countryside. It was where I learned the arts of paper making, marbling, sewing, batik, baking and cooking.
Creativity fuelled my childhood and my biggest dreams - to be an actress, a dancer, a National Geographic photographer and a fashion designer. I was hungry for the life of a creative, yet after a brief and somewhat disappointing flirtation in the fashion industry, something in me shifted.
In the years in between then and now, my creative spirit - burdened by the weight and pressures of "adulting" - dampened. I found myself driven more by the desire to make money than make art - believing in the perpetuating narrative that the two were mutually exclusive.
Creating art became something in my past. My focus was on the hustle. I landed a semi-creative corporate job and settled into city life. I found myself constantly 'doing', restless and unsatisfied.
Fifteen years later, I remembered - nothing is more important than just 'being'. All of the 'doing' had been a distraction from the grief of not living out my dreams!
After almost a decade in advertising, my path led me into the world of well-being and embodiment. For three years, I immersed myself in the healing practices that taught me how to reconnect to that childhood version of myself. It was raw and painful in ways, and beautiful and softening in others. Every experience in what I call my great "unbecoming" was illuminating and expansive. A stripping away of everything that had dimmed my light.
That's when I began drawing again, for no other reason than I couldn't not draw.
The artwork you see me create now comes from the result of this work. From learning to breathe again, to listen to the rhythms of my body, to experience wholeness and oneness and aliveness in my bones. To recall the pleasures of living in the present and the peace that arises from being still.
My art is an expression of my embodiment - A physical manifestation of what it means, to me, to return to the path of alignment.