: Shy, neurotic and eager to express love in whatever voice that speaks to me, I compensate for my stand-alone nature through the creative language of the imagination. Stitching since I could dress myself, writing since I could spell "luuv", I talk to those I care about in my creative voice. A lover of music and an adorer of those who perform it, I've blunted many pencils rough drafting along to 10-year-old walkman recordings of Giver. I've spilled many beads rendering visuals to the 15-year-old surface hiss of crotchety old CHMR tape-overs.
My heart festers in the past. My desire to love others is more defined than my desire to love myself. My patience barely begrudges the welfare police and child protection officers that tormented me and my seven siblings growing up. Creativity provides emotional freedom. I leave the boarded windows and leaky roofs behind me yet... I never let them go. Send my love to pre-renovation era, not-fit-to-live-in Prescott Street. Through writing and art, I find peace in poverty.
Bead Art: Strung, stitched, and mounted; portraits immortalize the people I love like bead shadows secured in starving art. Textile art - the visual art underdog - challenges the get-with-it-or-get-lost attitude of art snobbery. Bead art takes textile art to a stranger existence - one that feeds my soul yet I still feel the hunger to be appreciated. I love what I do but sometimes others don't so I still starve. I am the starving artist. The art loner. Fruit bowl painters and manufacturers of whatever sells want nothing to do with me. Buyers of whatever sells and sellers of whatever sells don't want to buy or sell beadwork. The money-minded mainstreamer promotes brand name beauty and offers little sympathy to the makers of everything that's different. My refusal to "get with" anything that says nothing to me about my life wins the ridicule of many art snobs. The newness that once won praises of "wow! never saw anything like that before", and "Hey! that's different", has been sharply demoted to "just beadwork". Rejection rankles in my brain; art bitchworkers and bitchwork manufacturers want nothing to do with things that aren't manufactured; bitchwork wants nothing to do with beadwork.
To run away to strange cities, to live on nothing but granola bars and warm water, to spend nights in hospitals and homeless shelters; trying to sell my starving art gets lost on the public. Long rides on buses to nowhere proved they're just not ready to supplement the diet of a stomach that chooses to be empty. But beadwork makes me happy. Whether or not others (and their money) like it may hurt my feelings but it won't keep me from my happiness. I'm not going to get rich off this as long as art critics (cynics) exist. I just want to do what I love. I just want to love. Pure, simple, mild necessities of will are spoiled by the world's greatest force: money.
Spilled beads, like nerves, scatter between the filaments of the carpet - Nightmares of living a lifetime in poverty stitched into corduroy and mounted on plywood. I continue with bead art because of the satisfaction of trying something new, finishing something good. Innovate. Accomplish. Feel good about yourself. It sucks to be different but I love it.
Special thank-you to
Anita Carrol and Valerie Hearder for believing in my art.
*My beadwork is available at Posie Row and the Tickle Trunk.
Meditatons: I've never been able to label my style of writing. Is it creative non fiction? Is it essay-writing? Is it poetry? Mmmm... sometimes. But I only recently decided that I wrote meditations on daily life.
Writing in black and white colours my autumn even more orange than poetry. Descriptive, narrative, or expository, they provide the nature and beauty of understanding; they help me "figure things out." The underdog of the literary template, the essay provides a season for understanding people that no other literary device could match. No hesitation interferes in disclosing my choice of black and white language over bead likeness. Black and white provides a balance for me to feel comfortable with myself and others through understanding. It's a clearer expression of love.
Liquor and drugs as life-remedy proves too grey for my autumn soul, I turn to the wine of words - my best friend. Someone to share my problems with, someone who wouldn't be bothered. Writing about the stuff that really got on my eighth grade nerves provided the closest thing to an autumn soul for a winter beaten body. Constrain the math tests and the annoying girl in the other class in a timeless cage of words. It's therapy. It gives me the creative strength to set myself free from the past. It helps me "figure things out" so I don't beat myself up when I beat myself up or carp on the ways of another when I can't figure them out.
Poeticized and often branching off into other genres of writing, my essays are typically very social - the curse of growing up in poverty. Anything that gets on your nerves has to be figured out somehow and I do so in my writing. I've loved to write for many years. I still have the many journals I kept through grade seven to nine (when it wasn't unusual for me to write as many as twelve pages a night). Redundant to note, I had plenty of inspiration: those were the worst years of my life. I drew the blood of my inspiration from the simple strategy of writing bad experiences down. This evolved into the sweet social essay that still turns my grey life to orange today.
Special thank-you to Gerard Collins and Helen Porter for believing in my writing.