My Childhood Drawings
Butterflies, Crayon on paper, around 2002, made for my godfather
When I was in my second year of graduate school at FSU, I was feeling severely burnt out and stuck on what to do with my work (as one naturally feels in grad school.) One night, when I was working in the studio, my godfather texted me to share these old, really shitty, drawings that I made for him as a kid. One of which, were the butterflies pictured on the left.
When he sent them to me, I immediately got emotional and started to cry. The drawings felt so pure and genuinely embedded with love for my family. They didn’t have any shame or self-judgement tied to them. They simply existed, in all of their crude and whimsical glory.
I used the butterfly drawing on my ceramic forms as a sort of collaboration with my past. Ultimately, I was trying to thread a connection back to a person that I used to be, and it ended up being an incredibly fulfilling experiment for me. I immediately knew that I wanted to get my hands on more drawings from my childhood.
Butterfly Cup, double-walled porcelain, leather cord, screen-printed newsprint transfers, 2023
I ended up calling my parents to ask them if they had possibly saved anything that I made as a kid. I didn’t really expect them to have much, maybe a few pictures here and there, but luckily for me my mom is very sentimental, and she assured me that she had several boxes up in the attic that were organized by what year of school I was in at the time.
When I came home for Winter Break, we pulled the boxes out of the attic, and my mom and dad helped me sort through them to find anything I wanted to hold on to. After a few hours of dusty papers, silverfish, and several “Aw, isn’t that so sweet!” I had a big pile of 20+-year-old artwork to bring to my studio and a newfound appreciation for the way my family expresses care.
I had only planned on receiving drawings from this endeavor, but I ended up receiving a surreal moment where I watched my mom and dad explore the past right next to me. And to see them stand there and take so much interest in silly stacks of papers that they held on to for so long touched me.
A small fraction of those dusty papers
My parents and godfather expressed acts of holding through physically holding on to the one-off objects and drawings that I created as a child. These things could easily have been thrown away (as anyone who’s been, or been around, a creative child knows: a ton of “art” accumulates very quickly), but they held on to the past, resulting in a positive experience for me much later in life.
Not that holding on to the past always results in positive moments; usually, it’s painful, unhelpful, and comes from a place of hurting and a desire for protection or control. And maybe this holding wasn’t helpful for them. Watching your full-of-love child grow up is, I’m sure, often painful; as time crawls forward, fights happen, trust diminishes, and barriers are built up. Ultimately, those relationships are alchemized into an entirely different interaction. They can become broken down and destroyed once too much change alters the original relationship.
Nevertheless, those acts of holding took place, and they provided us all with a moment of reconnection - one where I connected back to a past version of myself, my parents connected back to simpler memories of our family, and we all shared a thread of joy inspired by what used to be.
Home Plate, ceramic, underglaze chalks, 2026
Sharing this moment with my family made me realize that people commit to acts of care in the ways that they know how to. For my parents, it came from them saving and organizing mounds of papers that likely could have never amounted to anything, but when their artist daughter came back decades later to ask them to unbury the past, they immediately committed their time and labor to help me do exactly that, all for a silly idea I wanted to try.
I’m very grateful to my parents and my godfather for this elongated act of care, because if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have been able to build my work into the deeply resonant and healing ways that it exists in now.
Though my work, I’ve been able to immortalize a voice from a little girl who embraced joy, silliness, and who didn’t have shame attached to anything she made or felt. Now, I hold space for that girl and give her a voice to speak. As a ceramicist, I provide the canvas for her to embellish, but that voice will always be hers. Amplifying that past feels deeply vulnerable, but more importantly, it serves as an act of resistance to the heaviness of the world, and it reminds us that no matter what, we can always turn back to love.