Studio Reflection - February 2025

On keeping creativity alive during times of chaos.

How is your heart right now? How have you tended to it recently? How have you tended to the heart of another lately? Can you find some small warmth in your chest, a glimmer in your fingertips?

This month has forced me into a deep conversation with grief, transition, and instability. So many aspects of my life are in flux, from possible job instability, to transitions in my housing, to health and shifts in relationships and goals. I’ve been thinking deeply about how we keep creativity alive during these moments of chaos.

Truthfully, I’ve barely made any photographs this month. My camera has sat in its bag, which has been shuffled from room to room, and I’ve felt wholly unmotivated to take it out. I’m dissatisfied with the images that are in my mind to make-this is a familiar state of mind and one I look forward to, because I understand it as a sign that my artistic practice is growing, my photography is changing.

I know from the years I’ve been practicing photography that the only way out of this slump in photography is through. I need to pick up the lens, make a bunch of terrible photos, mull over why they’re terrible, make a bunch more images, then make an image that feels like a revelation. But that requires picking up the camera.

The depths of winter bring a slowness with them that is all but an instant freeze on my creative practice. Last winter I led a practice group with Kinship Photography Collective during winter that held me accountable to my practice-this year I have been utterly consumed by the chaos of my life.

In this chaos however, I’ve found something that has felt somewhat revelatory and affirming. I’ve long held that my creativity is not bound to photographs-I consider myself highly creative even if I’m not picking up the camera, drawing, or working on anything explicitly creative. I consider my creativity to be bound up in the way I engage with the world, the way I problem solve at my care job, or arrange the objects in my room, or curate my thrifted wardrobe.

More than ever this month though, I have found a satisfaction that feels close to the satisfaction I get from art making through my work with the Kinship Photography Collective. I’ve been practicing facilitating and curating more than I have in the past, and putting my creative energy into a community that has been wholly instrumental in the development of my work has felt so nourishing amidst the chaos of everything else.

As a chronically ill person who lives in a rural area, my social life is often highly dependent on my energy levels-do I have enough energy to drive the 30 minutes into town? How late am I planning on staying? Do I have any other obligations that I can stack together during my trip into town to maximize the trip?

I love living where I am. Returning home to a quiet road has been instrumental in regulating my nervous system over the past few years. I am often overstimulated while out in the world, between a migraine disorder and neurodivergence I can get overwhelmed and exhausted by simple tasks such as grocery shopping. Having a low stimulation environment-no traffic sounds, lots of space, true darkness at night, has been incredibly valuable.

So, contributing my energy to an online space that is both creative and full of care helps me round out my social life in a way that supports my fluctuating energy. Some of the folks I collaborate with are across the country-we know each other through small Zoom squares. Other folks are friends who are more local, but I may not get to see all the time between a strange work schedule and the aforementioned energy fluctuations.

This month, I was able to join the Don’t Smile community to give an online lecture about my work Upheaval, and felt again the power of intentional online spaces. I scrolled through the participants list before launching into my lecture, an experimental narrative weaving together research, family history, and my own thoughts into an essay-like structure to accompany the 70+ images in the project. I felt so lucky to recognize most of the names in the Zoom window, friends from all over.

I’ve also been connecting with people through grief. I attended my first grief circle in support of a dear friend this month. I wasn’t sure what to expect from it-I have done a lot of work with my own grief through photography-but having a conversation with others directly about grief, without a photograph to absorb or deflect vulnerability was a much different experience. Without sharing the details of my grief, I felt something dislodge as I named the self-imposed isolation that I often inflict on myself when I am struggling, and felt that struggle be seen.

Since then, I’ve noticed the tightness in my throat is less. The glass wall that descends some days between myself and the rest of the world is a little thinner. But of course, these things are not linear, and this week I have been sitting squarely in the middle of grieving a nervous system that is, at the best of times, reactive and prone to overwhelm. And let’s be honest, these are not the best of times.

So, how do I keep my creativity alive in a way that feels nourishing? I talked last month about the power of stories, and I’ve continued to devour books this month. I finally was able to read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “The Serviceberry,” and am so grateful for the balm of her writing. A book that had me gripped in its narrative and plausibility was “The Future” by Naomi Alderman. It hit very close to our current reality, with many twists and turns along the way.

I’ve had Type O Negative on repeat this month, particularly October Rust, but with some Bloody Kisses mixed in. I’ve needed darkness and reverent profanity to carry me along, some gorgeous vocals and distorted basslines. Music has always been in the background of my creativity, but I’ve been more intentional with the music that I listen to lately. This is partly due to my partner being a musician and incredible at dissecting and explaining music to me, which has revolutionized the way I understand and appreciate music, but also because I’m craving the agency of choosing what I consume.

The photography I have been looking at is equally dark and mystical. I received Flowers Drink the River by Pia-Paulina Guilmoth as a gift, and I am so grateful for this addition to my humble photobook collection. The images drip not only with darkness, but with glowing mysticism. Stanley Barker’s listing page notes “Flowers Drink the River is an animistic search for beauty, resistance, safety, and magic in a world often devoid of these things. It’s a love note to rural working-class people, trans women, lesbians, queer people and the backwoods of central Maine. Pia finds beauty and belonging as she creates a utopia hidden just barely out of reach.” The images feel like love letters, full of patient relationships with the more-than-human world. I am spellbound by this photography book.

I was speaking with a close friend recently about altered states of consciousness, and how experiencing a rare form of migraine which resulted in migraines that would stretch on for months at a time, shifted my sense of reality in perpetuity. There is something of that experience, of that transition from a commonly held experience of reality into a sensuous, subjective, surreal reality in Guilmoth’s book. There is something of that experience when I become triggered, in the sense that my nervous system becomes unmoored from the present, inhabiting a different time, a different experience, than the one in the present.

I’ve learned that creativity doesn’t have to equate to productivity. I am not defined as creative because of the number of photographs or illustrations I produce, but rather the way that I engage with the world. I try to think of the chaos in my life as problems to solve, opportunities to apply my creativity to have more agency in the shape and expression of my life. Someday soon I’ll pick the camera back up again, and in the meantime I’ll keep filling my days with inspiration.