Truth be told I struggled emotionally during and subsequently completing my MFA. I partly did it to myself as the program was intense and it asks a lot of you. You are continually exploring, and excavating who you are and what you want to say and why you want to say it. Sometimes by looking so deeply inward you reveal truths that are hard. I started asking myself what makes me, Me. You are more than the sum of your parts. You are all your lived experiences, good and bad. For me I dug deep into the bad- (see what I mean by I partly did it to myself?). If you visit my posts through out this website you can see what I mean by the bad. I am a woman, a mother and artist. I love intensely, feel things passionately. But, I also have childhood trauma, experienced an array of physical assault, family illnesses and death. When the emotions get hard I tend to retreat and pull away. With all of that work that I did, thats exactly what happened. The weight wasn’t lifted when the program went away it got heavier, because I am now this accomplished artist with this degree, who can spout names and themes and various opinions on Feminism. I felt like people expected me to be this new version of me but I felt/feel like a fraud.
My thesis work, if you are only now just discovering it, explores the domestic roles performed by women, including myself, focusing on ideas of maintenance, acts of care, and grief. I dove into themes of redundancy and interruption, creating works that reflect these concepts. To create these pieces, I set parameters that limited my tools to those found in the domestic realm, working within a physically constrained space dictated by my domestic duties. As a result, my work often appeared hurried, interrupted, or minimalistic. Those limitations led me to develop strategies that enable me to be creative and find the extraordinary in the everyday.
My motivation behind this work was to share my stories and give a voice to my experiences in the hopes of inspiring other women (or caregivers of any kind) and giving them a "Me too" moment, a sense of relatability. I had many conversations on how others related to my experiences, such as looking after young children and trying to maintain autonomy, or struggling to carve out time for their own interests.
However, when I began sharing my work with the broader artistic community, I was met with silence, which triggered self-doubt. Self-doubt can be paralyzing, and it led me back to the fundamental questions of who I am and what drives me. This prompted me to revisit the WHY behind my work and why it is important for me to explore the themes that I do. So I got out the shovel again and starting looking for the WHY. The short answer is the connection.
For the past two months I have been taking an immersion course into surface pattern design from Bonnie Christine. I love textiles, sewing and making things. I am so very passionate about creating, I did an MFA- that is a huge freaking big deal. If you go through my images, especially some of the earlier works leading up to my final thesis project you will see some similarities emerge- there is almost always a needle to thread to textile component. My thesis was about the problems of being a wife, mother, care-giver etc. and the struggles of maintaining oneself and identity within the role of domesticity. But what if, still exploring those themes I offer a solution? My WHY is still to connect, and to relate, to hear you, to see you, and to feel you. That is exactly why I want to share beauty and empower women through textiles and other design. I truly hope that we can connect, share stories, grow and learn from one another. I will show up with authenticity, humour, and maybe a martini.
Over the next while, I will be revamping my website and sharing some of my explorations into the world of Design through the lens of pattern and illustration. My hope is to successfully merge the concepts behind my thesis endeavors with this new direction.
