My Creative Life - Age 22-24

My graduate school experience was similar to my undergraduate in that I still wasn't the best at technical things, but I loved experimenting in different processes. Instead of focusing on printmaking, although that’s what I was teaching, I started making work mainly with fibers techniques. I discovered embroidery, and needlepoint, and papermaking, and bookmaking, and cyanotypes on huge banners, and dyeing, and shibori, and using wax, and 3-dimensional objects. And storytelling. My work was very text heavy. I wanted words to carry my viewers through the image and get them to piece together a story.

I was really inspired by fairy tales before I started grad school. I spent that whole summer before reading old german folklore that by the time school started I wanted to write my own. The idea behind this piece was to embroider the whole text of a story onto the tent calling on cave drawings and camp fire tales as inspiration. I'm so bummed I never finished this project and sadly it got lost in my move to Oregon.

At one point I wanted to make "sculptural paper" pieces that turned out to be REALLY gross and unsettling. These were made using old newspapers, wool roving, and fabric dye.

Those years in graduate school were also marked by a lot of personal experiences that instilled a lot of doubt and shame in me in ways I had never encountered before. I loved teaching students and working with them through their ideas, and I loved trying new mediums and exploring, but life happened. A lot of those moments of joy were marked in ways that set me up for a few years that were really challenging emotionally.

I didn't have the access to mental health care support when I really needed it. I had lived 1,500 miles away from my family during my four years of undergrad and never felt isolated. I always felt like I had a team of people cheering for me in the background. Now I was 3,000 miles away from all my support systems and I felt lost. It's taken me up until recently to realize that I was incredibly depressed during this time of my life. I shut myself off from a lot of people and I wish I could go back and foster those relationships in the way that they deserved.

This is a wide shot of my MFA thesis exhibit. The giant woven wall hanging is still one of the pieces I am the most proud of. The other pieces included small embroideries of shoes and bras, sketches I made of piles of clothes in very specific categories, two ballet flats suspended by thread that spun as people walked by, and another unsettling sculpture created by stuffing panty hose with cotton batting.

The other piece I was insanely proud of was this pair of tights that stretched out to 50 feet long. I couldn't unravel them for the final show because they were a tripping hazard, but when they were unraveled you could follow the legs all the way to the feet that were lightly embroidered. They read "a desirable girl." I had started dating online and the first person who messaged me said "If you were a desirable girl, why would you need to meet men online?"

These years included a lot of drifting. I was still adamant that I wanted to be an art educator because I loved working with students and didn't see any other career path. Because of my art school experience, my warning to others is that you can really force yourself to wear blinders. I didn't see any other career paths except teaching or being a full-time artist. That's incredibly dangerous. I think about how many opportunities I probably passed on because I didn't think anything else was an option to consider.

The road after graduate school was super bumpy (you'll read all about it in the next post!). What I am thankful for though was that that bumpy road forced me to experience a lot of different kinds of work. Hindsight is absolutely 20/20. In the mix of it I felt disillusioned and anxious. But now I can look back and see that all those odd jobs helped me build the skills I needed to get me to where I am right now.