Emergence Closing

Emergence

As this gallery showing at the Urban Arts Gallery comes to a close, I wanted to celebrate my piece Emergence winning second place in the show. I am so proud of this project because it was full of firsts for me. I think it’s safe to say the only familiar aspect of this was the acrylic paint I was using. I have never painted a blank skate deck, used air dry clay to sculpt, or used something as special as the deer antlers themselves. Let alone figuring out how to take all of those elements and mount them onto the skateboard in a durable way. I would be lying if I said the process was smooth. Like any other art piece it had its own unique set of challenges, but in the end I would say I learned and evolved as an artist more working on this than any other project in the past. Over 100 hours of work was put into this project before it was dropped off at the gallery. I learned to trust my instincts in a way I have never done before, and most important of all I learned a knew way of “embracing the process”. I fully lived in the chaos of everything that came with experimenting and figuring out how to get it to all come together. I felt it ALL from excitement to pure panic to doubt back to excitement again over and over until the end. However, with all that being said I loved every second of it. For the first time I felt like I could relax and embrace the chaos that came with all of the new elements involved. It was a different feeling of calm knowing that it was going to be a disaster, and that a lot of the execution would fail the first couple of attempts. In the end I embraced every bit of it and I am so proud of how it came out in the end. Going forward, I now have so many new skills to apply to future mixed media sculpture pieces, but also have a new understanding of how I want to go about my traditional paintings to make them pop even more. I am so excited for whats to come in the future and am so excited to document those big updates on future projects here.

The full behind the scenes and process can be found here if you’re curious and want to read more.

I also want to add a huge thanks to my grandparents for donating the set of antlers to this project. I think it is so beautiful to give the antlers a new form of life that hopefully will live on for a long time to come.

Original deer antler set donated by Terri and Terry Wright