a practice of making
my first few stitches, learning to knit with my dadi.
I always said I wasn’t creative.
I grew up with an architect mother and an engineer father. My mother went to art school in the early ‘80s, spent a year drawing the blueprints for our someday home, and has the most impeccable sense of color and design. As a child, I leaned into the binary, as children do: there was either logic or art, but not both. I was good at math and couldn’t draw — so, obviously, I wasn’t creative.
I kept that story alive until one essay in college, a 20-page reflection after a semester studying music in Vienna. I started the essay the same way: I am not a particularly creative person.
When I got the graded paper back, my professor had left a flurry of notes on the first few paragraphs — mostly grammatical errors, sentence-level improvements. The comments quickly disappeared, though, and I flipped through the rest of the pages searching for the next one, surprised not to see anything else until a comment on the very last sentence.
Later, when I ran into him back in our basement music department, he said: “Don’t ever say that about yourself again.”
And I haven’t.
In fact, in the decade and a half since, I’ve swung around completely the other direction — that every human is creative, that creativity takes an infinity of different forms — that maybe (just maybe!) we’re actually all artists?! Humans interpret the world through the senses (think of the words sensory, sensuous) — and so the art I make is a practice of embodiment, of coming back to the simplest understandings of ourselves.
I’ve found a home in the word maker. I make things. My hands feel empty when I am not making something — with words, textiles, plants, textures, light, and color.
On April 15, I am teaching INTIMATE PORTRAITS, an online workshop on cultivating self-intimacy through a practice of self-portraiture.
this class is for you if:
you want to explore sensuality as something that is just for you and no one else, first and foremost.
you have felt dissociated from your body and want to come home to yourself.
you also delight in playing with light and shapes and texture and colors!
pleasure feels terrifying, shame feels overwhelming, and you want some tools to engage gently.
you are not sure if you are an artist or if you’re creative or maybe you’re just a human (all humans are creative!)
you, too, believe that beauty and joy can be reason enough.