Japanese paper, gilding wax, embroidery, charcoal, ridiculously small nails and an abundance of lessons.

Submitting for the All Small Show in 2024 was an odd step and important for me as an artist. At that point in time I'd been a professional creative for 10 years and someone who'd made things for much longer. The idea of presenting work to a client or even the public is something I'm deeply familiar and comfortable with, and in a professional setting I love showing, defending, and publishing the things I and my teams have created. Outside of that? The story is different.

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I have always struggled showing my work to real-life friends and family, especially for fun or more creative pursuits. Over the past few years, I have sought a return to making things for myself and for the sake of creativity. The final step remained to get bold enough to include others in this. The All Small Show was this opportunity. The show itself featured many of my friends, my proposed subject matter would also involve loved ones, and the biggest thing of all, a whole community I care about would see it up for an entire month.

The process was long, almost solely due to my own complications, adding new bits and ideas to culminate in a tryptic that I was excited to create. The community of it all was also invaluable, having friends also be in the thick of the highs and lows of making things to chat with, laugh with, and problem solve. It made it much more of a group voyage, than a solo project and, at least for a few of us, we got to be experimental and play together as we created. The result for me was the series shown above, for others is was a personal underworld of embroidery, sets of acrylic cats, posca markered characters, or Maine landscapes. The process taught me a lot for works to come, particularly what not to use to apply gilding wax. I finished my set of three pieces 45 minutes before the deadline, and while I'd like to say that won't be the case this year, it really just might.