In the past few years, I've come to realize that my desire to capture the beauty of neglected things and places has actually been a lifelong process of healing and loving myself. This is what I find so endlessly fascinating about creativity. ⁠

Since I was a kid, I've been drawn to honor the forgotten or discarded, not knowing why. Not realizing that in each photograph of an old barn or sculpture made from discarded junk I was honoring myself. The little girl who lost her mother young, and who spent her teens years emotionally neglected, feeling alone, and often times very lost and forgotten. It has taken my own daughter reaching her teens now to begin to fully realize just how lacking any emotional support was for me as a teenager. It turns out, I was seeing myself in those lonely or forgotten things, and honoring them in my art was a way to honor myself.⁠ Who knew? Man, creativity, you are sneaky!

Our creativity is an amazing thing. I'm learning that it has a knowing. It has a way of helping us heal and be more whole and beautiful beings right under our very noses. Working always in the background for our greatest good. Helping us to honor ourselves more fully, especially the parts of ourselves that might need the most healing of all. Love to you my friends!