About the Project

And other endeavors.

If you would like to read about the project that started all of this, and what I am doing with it now, travel here: keep reading.

While my primary art media include floral pressings and bookbinding, I also get my hands into oil painting, drawing with pen or graphite, metal work, stained glass, woodworking, and textiles.

Most of my art work is part of a larger “living art” collection; however, I do just simply enjoy being creative and making things by hand. Below you can read about how my main project came to be and how it has morphed over the years, as well as the other things make.

Current (2026 – Present)

Right now, I am working both forward and backwards at the same time. I am revisiting my projects of the past, looking at their technique, the skills that I had at the the time, and the design styles I was developing. I am also revisiting the stories that brought me to where I am now. These, all together, propel me forward with a drive of relentless experimentation and, perhaps, obsessive determination to organize what I have built thusfar.

While I have always been philosophically involved when crafting, I am currently working on developing clearer explanations of what my work has been and honing in on the meanings of what I make. I particularly am interested in the hand, which still matters a great deal. I believe it is an immensely surreal experience to be able to take what we find around us and create something that is greater than the sum of its parts, transforming not only material, but what the materials represent, symbolism, and hold within them.

There is no differentiation between art and life. I have continuously reaffirmed this throughout the development and growth of my project or craftings.

A form of memory built into each piece, penmanship in crafting, and an archive of experience

Development of the Maker’s Seal (mid-2025)

I have long played around with seal ideas for myself and have had immense trouble designing one that feels appropriate. Mid-summer in 2025, it finally dawned on me to use my name meaning that I had been using for every other branding item of my project. An obvious idea once recognized.

I went to playing with rubber pads for lino cuts and explored, what the Japanese often use for seals, hankos. I studied the different versions of these, their history, intent, anyhow they were designed or made. After doing so, I got to my pen and paper, and started designing a stylized seal in one of my project tracking books that I had bound (The Eye for Design). based on the kanji for “teardrop”

I juggled a few different transformations of the kanji and even played with some imagery, but settled for a more squared-off, line version.

Mastering Possibility (Early 2025)

Mastering Possibility is the title of one of my hand bound protea wood books and was born in early 2025 as a “new leaf” chapter in my bookbinding and “living art” adventures. Mastering Possibility is based on the commonplace book and I highly suggest making one for yourself if don’t have one!

I wanted this book to facilitate positive frameworks in my life’s perspectives, as well as document my efforts to keep building a better version of myself through reiterative processes. I did not want the book itself to be a destination; I wanted it to be a journey that would slowly catalogue things I learn throughout the years and act as a repository for later use. It is filled with advice, deep values that I identify for myself, quotes I find helpful or meaningful, and lessons I wanted to be reminded of later on.

Tear/Teardrop Development

In late 2022, I was attempting to find the right maker’s mark. I wanted it to be deeply person and symbolic of my self, themes I put into my work, and representative of the broad possibilities for the future. Returning to the meaning of my name became an obvious choice for developing this mark, as well as a name for all of the pieces that I create. Since my name primarily means “sorrow” and “tear/teardrop”, I was on a path destined to find the outcome I did.

My SOS project was exploring sorrow already, which kept teaching and reiterating to me that: 1) “not all tears are sad” and 2) to slow down and sit with various pains – not to push them aside. Sorrow, like many other emotions, offers powerful lessons about the strength in pause, facing pain, and healing. I continuously was finding myself not only about sorry as an emotional teacher, but “Sorrow” as myself.

Tears can be produced when being whelmed to the point of outpour of emotion (literally, overwhelmed), such as joy, thankfulness, anger, fear, and so on. I remember a moment where I realized that each of my art pieces were analogous to shedding a tear. Overwhelmed with a sense of creativity while exploring emotions, situations or the self, I would “shed” an art pieces, which I then called, “Tears”. This is where my first maker’s mark was born and it was inlayed into my first book I had ever made (by accident) on the back, centered toward the top.

This is my first Tear I had ever made as a maker’s mark, on my first journal I bound.

Reclamation among the Frames of Reference/The Garden

Reclamation of the Frames of Reference was the journaling project for my floral pressings.

The Garden is the collection of all of the floral pressings.

The Shard of Sense

The broad project that most of my art falls under is established as a “living art”.

is my longest enduring project and mean to span my life. Even if I am gone, I can endure. it is more of a guiding philosophy.

Named after a story I found in Bittersweet. had all these pieces around me and needed to rebuild, as I felt broken and disconnected.

Shard of Sense is literally fragments of senses to reclaim my senses, reconnect with the world around me, and to bridge the inner and outer worlds. It was a chance to rebuild.

Connecting to My Past

gave up a lot of art for school, fell away from it, returned to plants, nature, being present, etc.

Initial Art Pieces

When I moved into my house, which I bought in 2021, I finally had a space that was able to be transformed in ways I could not do while renting. Suddenly, I was able to create a home.

I am a firm believer that homes are like living organisms and they are reflective of the mind(s) of those who live in them. Things come and go, shift and move. Rooms are restructured and adapted to the changing needs or desires of life. This mirrors the process of the rooms and halls that change in the mind. As such, I got to see how my home reflected my mind and, in a feedback loop, took an intentional approach to the art of self architecture.

Part of my architectural learning was getting back into graphite or pen drawings. Above is the first of my graphite drawings, later named The Shards of Sense (SOS), that led to two other drawings shortly thereafter before I switched to ink pen and oil painting (as I often cycle through media).

SOS:Graphite was a drawing I produced from a mental image I had of how I felt at the time. I tried to pour a medley of emotions into paper through the shading and layering of graphite, and depict what the combination of those emotions looked like to me. It ended up being an image of myself at the time, seated in a void in a reaching pose, attempting to touch a water droplet that is suspended yet creating ripples in the matter below. The droplet was supposed to be an inverse world. I felt trapped inside this droplet, drawn to touch it but not entirely in control. I also felt like a whole vibrant world lived on the other side of its surface, acting as a portal between the inner and outer. My face appears absent, almost like a mask of thick mist shrouding my identity and my body is separated from the environment, disconnected and having little (if any) impact on the matter around it – contrasting the droplet.

In some ways, this was an “SOS” from within. Looking back, it is a bit ironic how it was a droplet that I chose to depict as this is likely a symbol of a suspended tear. That tear, large and vibratory, contained the entire world that would be unleashed as I began to unravel my project in what often feels like a vining frenzy. Once one idea begins to come out, there are 12 more forming.

From this piece, I went on to do a drawing myself at the time to connect with my body and practice looking at it with more gentle eyes, as well as feeling more at home in it. The image that came from this is below.

I then moved to stippling for meditation practice in the evenings, surrounded by colorful neon lights and soft house or lofi music.

Then, I had another emotion I tried to depict, which ended up appearing as myself, back turned toward the viewer and bow and arrow in hand. Around the arrow’s point, my experiences or environments were pulled in and narrowed. What I shot forward would find its way back to me in time; thus the image of an hour glass horizontally that connects the two edges of the paper together into a circular image. The arrow is supposed to be comprised of the intangible, which is why I can be seen “holding” it without touching it, yet still having tension.

Learning My Name

I embarked on a journey to discover what my name meant in the context of my own life because I had been told that my name meant “sorrow” around this time. I had a knee-jerk reaction to this information because I had troubles with depression or anxiety for years, and was a bit upset that I would be my namesake in terms of sadness. Around this time, I also had watched a movie (Haiyo Miyazaki’s Spirited Away) and a particular scene struck me, staying with me since then. The scene is when Chihiro meets Yubaba’s twin sister, Zeniba, and Zeniba says, “‘Chihiro,’ what a pretty name. You take good care of it“. This felt symbolic of a name being something to literally hold and take care of – to treat with respect and protection. So, I decided to do just that and learn about what my own name meant.

In the search for my name’s meaning, I found that its etymology included “sorrow”, “tear/teardrop”, “brave” and “raven”. This was multilayered and reassuring to me. I was not just named “sadness” as is often implied with “Sorrow”. I had an emotion to my name, a physical substance, a character trait or action, and a totem.

I searched each item and fell down every rabbit hole you could imagine to continue my breadth of inquiry. Each search was continuously reassuring and reaffirming my path being built before me.

Beginnings

At the end of 2019, I was working in clinical research assistant role where I aided in sample collection. It was not long before COVID-19 would become a global pandemic and would completely change my role, as well as the rest of the world.

Throughout the pandemic, I assisted with COVID-related research efforts. This ended up taking a toll on my mental health, as I was in direct contact with the effects of the virus. Several events took place in my personal life, in addition to major changes to where I stood in my life’s journey. As always, I looked to art as a way of release and transformation. It served as a means for self architecture and making sense of the world.

I started with literature. There was a book that I had gotten from my previous role, one concerned on a practical guide to mindfulness. I used this book to help center myself through the tumultuous changes and thin the perceived barrier between the “outside” and the “inside” worlds. Often this would take place down by a stream in the woods near the apartment I lived in at the time. I would sit on a rock in the middle of the falling water or in the bend of a tree that reached out over the stream to ponder and meditate. I focused on the things that I heard, felt, smelt, and saw. The gentle shift of filtered sunlight through the forest’s canopy would eventually teach me to sense time in a different manner. These focused moments brought me closer to simply being.

Later on I stumbled upon books like The Book of Human Emotions, How to Read Nature, Bittersweet, and Obscure Sorrows. I would also return to the thesaurus and dictionary, which I still enjoy reading from time to time as silly as that may sound to some. (You can find a list of books I really like on the resources page if you’d like to check them out.) Each of these books illuminate the subtle nuance and intricate meaning behind words, their etymology, and how imperative communication is. For me, it also highlighted that we often do not say what we mean, rather, we interpret or assume based on cognitive norms or personal understandings.