"Embroidery artist" is always what I say when people ask what kind of work I do. It's more or less accurate, although I often feel that it's slightly lacking. Not because I don't do embroidery, I absolutely do. But because I do slightly more than embroidery. I would say about 50-75% of my work includes beading as well. Though similar to embroidery, beading is a different technique, with different materials. Still, "embroidery and beading artist" always felt like a mouthful. At the end of the day, I take fabric, thread, and beads, and turn it into a work of art.

There's something so wonderfully tactile about embroidery and beads. You can't ignore that they're 3D, in their own quiet way. That's always what attracted me toward them. Drawing never seemed quite enough. I could create something beautiful, yes, but it was somehow still lacking something more. I eventually tried my hand at embroidery and immediately knew I had found that something I had been missing. This was tactile, it was physical, it expressed so much more of what I was seeing in my mind's eye.

And what I was seeing was moments and ideas that brought me joy. Getting my hands dirty in the garden, stepping outside on a spring day as the sun breaks through after a storm, learning about mystical symbology and tracing those symbols back through art history. For now, that's as deep as any meaning behind my art really is. I reach for those things that bring moments of joy within myself, and I try to excavate that and bring it out into the world as art to bring joy to someone else.