I am a self-taught artist based in Nashville. I began making art in 2021 and publicly sharing it in 2022 as a form of self-directed therapy in order to practice overcoming anxiety and shame-based behavior (including perfectionism, avoidance, procrastination, and trauma responses such as disassociation).
My behavioral issues started greatly interfering with my life around 2017. They became totally debilitating for a couple of years before I began to realize something was wrong. After getting some help, I began to learn that there were underlying root problems that were causing my issues.
After several years of extensive time spent in therapy, learning to practice metacognition, and then getting to know myself for the first time, I realized I needed a daily practice to learn how to re-wire my brain to be more self-loving. My goals were to better know and love myself, and therefore be able to better stand up to my inner critic and to learn to regulate my emotions and behavior.
This is when I began to make art, and it has become a central tool for me to practice self-compassion, taming my inner critic, and moving away from shame-based avoidance and anxiety.
In the past, if I didn't know how to do something exactly right, I would compulsively and obsessively research it for days; usually moving on to researching something else before ever taking action on my original task. I kept myself busy constantly but was never actually moving forward--just sprinting in quicksand, for years.
Making imperfect creations (or making mistakes) and publicly sharing them used to be my worst nightmare, but now that has become the central tenet of my art practice. I still continue to struggle with many of the same issues, but art has helped me take some steps in the right direction.
I make playful, imaginative, and often humorous pieces that have been described as folk, outsider, or self-taught art. Themes in my work often relate to aspects of mental/emotional health (based on my own ongoing journey), various absurdities of society, or information learned from my years spent obsessively researching anything you can imagine and/or from my previous career as a transactional attorney.