When your current ways of being feel too tight, it’s time to shed them and evolve into the next, beautiful phase.
Those who have been with me for a while will know I used to create detailed, scientific illustration-style art. Yet now I am making increasingly abstract works with the land.
I realised I've never shared this evolution of practice so here it is. It's a long one so make a cup of something delicious, sit in the sunshine or near the warmth and enjoy (I don't know about you, but I love reading about people's journeys):
Why did I change the art I make and what have I learned from it?
We Are Stardust started off in 2016 as a greetings card and print shop. I created designs that described a moment of wonder for nature with detailed, scientific illustration style, drawings and paintings.
After years of working in the offices of universities I was craving making again…and the card and print designs helped me ease back into making (I’d always made art up until my early 20s when I started work and stopped).
We Are Stardust as a greetings card and print shop was great; I loved connecting with people through the greeting cards. I loved the idea of sending something slow by mail, handwritten, considered and thoughtful.
But there came a point where the designs I was making started to feel restrictive.
Learning 1. Listen to the nudge for change
Firstly, to make the money I desired from We Are Stardust I would have to start selling A LOT of greetings cards. And I began to realise that making greetings cards is not why I started We Are Stardust.
I started We Are Stardust to share the wonder and enchantment and rapture of being alive on this incredible planet.
Secondly, and most importantly, I was starting to feel restricted by the detailed illustrations I was doing. I wanted to get messy, I wanted to make outside WITH nature rather than just making drawings OF nature. I wanted to feel mud under my feet, ink soaked into my fingernails and find a bit of alchemy and magic in my art. The carefully controlled detailed drawings were starting to feel like I was holding my creativity too tightly.
(A side not here to say I still treasure the opportunity to carefully notice nature and relay these observations as accurately as possible onto the page (it helps us turn our loving attention to the detail, to the small, to other worlds with a patience and consideration). These careful observations are still integral to my art practice and you can see that with the root drawings I did in the Rivers Run Through Us art collection.
Learning 2. Allow creative nudges to emerge in places where you feel most whole (rather than not enough)
I strongly believe that this shift in how I wanted to express my creativity as because of the Rewild Your Soul adventures I was creating and participating in around 2020-2021, and the wild journalling that came out of it. The sense of interconnected, mysterious, continuously moving and evolving aliveness of nature was building inside my soul and I wanted my art to reflect that.
Learning 3. Capture movement and aliveness through creative play WITH nature (or release control!)
In 2022 I felt drawn to starling murmurations because of their movement and their mystery (no one knows quite why starlings fly in murmurations). I began to explore how to capture movement on a static page. Drawing hundreds of tiny starlings was a meditative, mesmerising experience. I would blur my vision while I drew to try and see the overall movement in the paintings. The Starling Murmuration Original Art Collection was the start of this new direction of making art exploring how to capture the aliveness of the earth on the page.
I began playing with natural inks too – the starling murmuration paintings were made with acorn ink. There was something about the physicality of working with nature and collaborating with nature to make paintings and drawings that really appealed as I tried to capture the sense of aliveness and movement of the murmurations. The natural ink meant I had to let go of my old, tightly controlled way of making drawings as the ink was less predictable on the page.
Around the same time, I started getting interested in rivers, particularly my local river the River Great Ouse (the river I also grew up with in childhood). I felt drawn to the river, it’s movement, water, shape and started sitting by its banks and swimming in its waters. I began to want to capture the feeling of being by and with the river on the page - the sensation of swimming in the river, the feeling of witnessing its powerful winter floods, the feeling of watching birds and mayfly skim its shimmering summer surface. I wanted to capture the river as a living, breathing place full of life and movement.
Learning 4. Bring in support from folk who will nurture you and inspiration from other artists (including the river)
Following acceptance onto the Watermarks course with Drawing Correspondence I started to experiment with writing the river’s movement through drawing its surface ripples and eddies without looking at the page. I’d immerse myself in watching the movement – another almost trance-like state – as I transcribed the lines onto my blank paper.
The course was immersive, I was introduced to many new-to-me artists and the way I made my work changed quickly during the six weeks. I started to playing with muddy river silt creating movement through mud spills and mud paintings where poured and washed mud down and over the page, working WITH the materials of the land.
Learning 5. Releasing my artwork into the world is part of the process
I now have a wonderful art mentor who has helped me keep the momentum going and worked with me to release the Rivers Run Through Us Collection into the world from a place of confidence. I know the work I am now making is a more soulful expression of how I see and experience the world. I know my work is good. And releasing it for other folk to enjoy and make meaning from is part of the process, the next stage of its evolution.
Learning 6. Rewilding my soul helped me rewild my art
As my view of the more-than-human world shifted from one of me observing nature to one of be being an interconnected part of nature my art also shifted. I now collaborate WITH nature to make work that captures the experience of aliveness and movement I have when being WITHIN a place.
Perhaps as I rewild my soul, I am also rewilding my art?
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I wonder where life is feeling tight and constricting for you? Perhaps that feeling is one to listen to? Perhaps it’s telling you to step into a new era, to release an old version of you to make way for the next?
