I wish I could craft words as easily as I shape warm beeswax in my hands. Words on a white page have always seemed too stark to me, too crude to describe a life lived. I didn’t learn to read until late into primary school..written words were baffling to me. Despite this struggle, I’d communicated with my twin sister through some sort of unique language from an incredibly early age.
But what I’m coming to realise is that I can approach writing with the same freedom I create art with. I was naive to think that you start writing with words. Instead, you start a piece of writing by forming images in your mind. Memories and experiences leave imprints that sometimes we don’t even remember are there until we look for them. I piece these fragments together, build language from their invisible parts- creating form from the formless experience of things.
Maybe there aren’t words to describe this process adequately and that’s why I make art.
I grew up dyslexic, struggling to read, developing secret strategies to hide and cope. I couldn’t write the number 8, so I secretly made it from two circles instead. Selective mutism. Trauma I didn’t have language for. My throat felt paved with glass– that’s exactly how it felt when I tried to speak in class. Words failed me, literally failed me as a child who couldn’t speak, whose throat closed up, who learned to survive by staying quiet. When I was little, my twin sister and I had two toy plastic spiders. We named them “Good” and “Bad.” Good no longer squeaked when you pressed it as the squeaking mechanism had broken inside it. Bad still made noise. I’m sure there’s something deeply Freudian in those names we chose!
My twin sister and I were born premature- arriving seven or so weeks early. We lived with undiagnosed vision problems until halfway through Art School. We’d been capturing life on half focus, seeing the world through blurred vision, accepting a mumbled word instead of a clear voice. When we finally got contact lenses, suddenly our drawing became way more detailed. I have no idea if that was an improvement. We’d been living in soft focus our whole lives and it was a protective filter through which to view the world.
And now I’m making work about bringing things into focus. Giving form to what was blurred. Preserving light through dark winters. Refusing to let things be pinned down and flattened like traditional herbarium specimens.
The botanicals with curled edges that won’t stay flat on the scanner..thats a piece of me. That’s my twin sister too. That’s refusing to be contained, classified, made neat and presentable.
I press botanicals between two pieces of paper and take graphite impressions of both surfaces; both sides of the plant at once. This an attempt to describe my experience of twinhood. Two impressions of the same thing, mirror images and yet shadows of each other. The dance of the visible and what’s invisible moving in tandem.
The ghostly layers, the half-formed identities, the things that curl away. Of course this is my aesthetic. I’m working with memory, with childhood, with premature birth and blurred vision. Ghostly is honest.
I studied anatomy and physiology years ago during my nursing training. But when I look at plant roots, I still see blood vessels. When I look at leaves, I see loom-like structures, weaving systems. Like the bronchioles inside our lungs. These airways are the trees of our respiratory system.
The flower heads looking up toward the sun like a face looking for warmth. This isn’t metaphor, this is how I actually perceive the world. I see the anatomical structures, the life systems, the vessels that carry sustenance.
My hoarding of dried flowers, my obsession with my honey bees storing light and pollen for winter. I’m doing the same thing. Storing life force. Trying to hold onto summer, onto light, onto the feeling of being alive when everything else feels overwhelming and half-formed.
My work gives voice to voiceless things. Plants can’t speak. Premature babies in incubators can’t speak. The domestic labor of mothers, the invisible care work – it doesn’t speak either, doesn’t count as “earning money,” exists in the background while other people’s businesses run on “his” family’s land.
Materials became my language. Beeswax, graphite, botanicals, creased Polaroid photos- these are my words. When speech failed me early in my life, my hands learned a different vocabulary to express. The slow, contemplative process of layering encaustic. The patient documentation of each botanical specimen. The voice notes I record while working, capturing thoughts that would otherwise be lost. This is my visual language.
It’s my voice, but in form. Perhaps not articulate in the way galleries might expect? But honest. Embodied. Real.
The work isn’t about explaining. It’s about witnessing. About refusing to let things disappear into darkness. About preservation that honours wildness rather than containment.
So when you look at the curled edges, the glowing layers and the restless botanical specimens… I’m showing you my voice it’s just that sometimes only my hands can make the right words.