It all begins here

I've been creating for as long as I can remember. For much of my adult life, though, I was creating for other people. Designing, drawing, making, solving. Art was always there, but the part of it that belonged only to me somehow became quieter over time.

Then an illness arrived, making my world very small. There were months when I couldn't do much more than lie in bed. People I loved sent soft blankets, headscarves, and little offerings of comfort, and I began drawing botanicals for them as thank-you gifts. Before I could return to much of anything else, I could draw.

Poppy & Bee

When your world becomes small, small things become very big. I've always been someone who notices the little things, but suddenly I was humbled by them. A stem bending under its own weight. A petal barely holding on. Sometimes the last petal falling devastated me. I realized it wasn’t really about the petal, but about living. I was facing my own mortality and living inside a body I could no longer take for granted. I began paying attention to life in all forms and observing time in a way I hadn't before, with so much reverence for it.

As I got stronger, my world started opening again. When I could walk farther and carry my camera, I began photographing constantly in nature: birds, flowers, light, the small pieces of life happening around me. Photography gave me a way to hold on to fractions of time while they were still here. I decided to brave showing my work and applied to the Bellevue Arts Fair, a nationally recognized juried fine-art event, intending photography to be a large part of what I would show.

And then I dropped my camera.

By then I had already been accepted into the fair, so I pivoted and decided to focus on still-life painting, something I had always loved but had also been intimidated by. I dove into it, and it completely absorbed me. For months I painted, pulling from the things that had surrounded me through recovery: flowers, birds I had photographed, previously loved handmade vessels, worn surfaces, remembered places, and the small pieces of life I had learned to pay closer attention to.

My home had changed during that time, too. Plants seemed to multiply everywhere, and I began collecting previously loved handmade pottery and replacing ordinary things with objects that felt meaningful to use. I loved wrapping my hands around a handmade mug and wondering about the hands that had formed it before it ever reached mine. I became drawn to the evidence of time and use: cracks, worn surfaces, marks left by hands and years. Those things naturally began finding their way into my paintings alongside flowers whose lives were much shorter.

Sometimes I painted from something I'd seen, sometimes from photographs or memory, and sometimes from something I wished existed. In some ways, I think I was painting toward a life I could imagine again.

A studio I haven't met yet. Flowers I'll grow in my garden one day. Handmade vessels collected from other artists. Worn surfaces and good light. Plants spilling into places they probably shouldn't. A room with enough space to leave a painting exactly where it is overnight and step right back into it the next morning.

Somewhere during those months, art stopped feeling like something I did and became something I couldn't imagine not doing. And slowly, I began making my way back. Not back to whoever I was before. It felt more like returning to something that had been there long before any of this. Not discovering who I am, but remembering. The artist in me. Even writing that word has taken some getting used to, but I am bravely stepping into ‘her’ now, and there’s nothing more important than all of us living in our authentic selves.

In July 2026, I began sharing this deeply personal body of work publicly for the first time. I still don't have the studio. For now, my 900-square-foot home is doing its very best impression of one. There are paintings and brushes everywhere, frames leaning against walls, and a dining table that has completely abandoned its original purpose.

Frida, one of my heroes, appearing through a frame — ever art herself.

Looking back, I can see how Of Moss & Memory grew out of all of it: an altered relationship with time, the need to create even when I was ill, flowers and birds and handmade things, and the beauty I began finding in age, wear, imperfection, and transformation. Illness didn't make me an artist. In some strange way, it forced me back toward something I had loved long before it happened.

There are many stories inside the work that I haven't told yet.

I'd like to begin here.