2019 You were amazing

It’s the last Sunday in December and my last blogpost for this year.

I wrote a decade in review earlier this month, but today I am sharing some behind the scenes stories, and why 2019 is an amazing year for me.

I started the year in January on holidays in Western Australia listening to an online business training course. It was 2 in the morning and I was in the holiday house loungeroom listening to a woman in Switzerland talking about numbers. I hate numbers! The first thing I ever did was to get an accountant twenty years ago so I never would have to do my tax again.  Yet here I was with my earplugs in, madly taking notes about excel sheets and costs, revenue and outgoings. It wasn’t vaguely interesting yet I was glued to my computer screen mesmerised by a woman in a red dress called Sigrun inspiring me to become a business entrepreneur.

Then came the opportunity to talk to Sigrun online and I got to learn more about her message, that she was originally from Iceland and her mission was to accelerate gender equality to empower women to help change the world. She was talking my language! I was hooked! I took a deep breath and signed up to her SOMBA coaching program, my #1 daring step of the year.

Little did I know that by the end of the year I would be well and truly on my way to becoming a business entrepreneur with successful online courses, something I had never even dreamed of before. 

Rewind to my thinking in January – I had finally resigned from my job as a school librarian. It took a lot of courage to resign after 10 years and I have only ever done a similar thing once before and that was more than 20 years ago. Both times I had to believe that when you step into the void, the stepping stones will appear. I believed that then and I believe that now. 

It turned out that in February I had to go back to my job and help out until they found a replacement for me. By then I knew that I had secured an exhibition in March so that was when I walked out of the school library never to return. My #2 daring step of the year. 

In March I held my solo exhibition Deluge based on work I created following the flooding of my studio in 2017. This was my #3 daring step, investing in myself to hold an exhibition in a commercial gallery with more than twenty framed works. It was both exciting and scary simultaneously. 

Then I drove to north Queensland, quite a big deal, to try and connect with artists in Townsville who just had a similar experience with terrible floods. The people I talked to were in such shock I was not able to really connect on any project level. I did collect sheets and clothing that were deemed too stained or dirty for donation to the families affected by the flood. They were perfect for my purpose. I returned home to turn rags into paper.

Exhibition Opening of Deluge at the M-Arts gallery, Murwillumbah with Julie Barratt who opened the event.

My #4 daring step was to learn a new language of marketing and sales and run my first short online course in April. But I found the whole thing completely overwhelming so I put it aside for a while and focused on what I knew I could do best, my art.

In Easter I went to Curtin Springs, an hour’s drive east of Uluru where I undertook an artist residency making paper from native grasses. There I met fellow artist in residence, Samantha Tannous, who is a textile artist. We hit it off as two artists working in different mediums but with similar aesthetics.

In May I was busy pulping up the workmen’s shirts and sheets I collected in Townsville to make paper pulp while finishing the artworks I started in the desert. I was also invited to travel my Deluge exhibition to Southern Cross University in Lismore where the National Centre for Flood Research is based.

During these two months I filmed short videos for social media about collage and the importance of an arts practice but my online business wasn’t moving forward. I didn’t know quite how to start again so I procrastinated, feeling a bit of an imposter.

Dying paper at Curtin Springs artist residency

Straining paper pulp ready to dry & transport to Iceland

In June Sigrun invited everyone in her program to run a Somba Summer School free online course of our own devising and she would guide us every step of the way. OK, I thought, I’ll give it another go. I had some time to come up with a course idea and start promoting it. It was at this time I saw an email with a last-minute offer to go on an artist residency in Skagaströnd in Iceland in October. Needless to say I applied with no expectation that I would be accepted. 

Somehow there was a magical Icelandic connection taking shape and I started to get my hopes up. What are the chances – my online coach is Icelandic and here is an artist residency in Iceland, and being held in October when the annual lighting of the Imagine Peace tower happens in Reykjavik on the anniversary of John Lennon’s birthday.

Roll on July, a spectacular month when many things all happened at once. First up I found out that my proposal for the artist residency in Iceland was accepted. I was over the moon! I then took the next #5 daring step and invested more money to book a ticket to Iceland.

Iceland calling! Sunset outside the NES artist residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland

I then headed south to visit Samantha at her home studio, where we resolved much of the work we had started at Curtin Springs and put together a joint exhibition proposal for Northern Rivers Community Gallery in Ballina. 

While there I also launched my Somba Summer School 4-week online course, Activate Your Creative Mojo. This was a great success with participants really busting through procrastination and perfectionism to get their art practices activated. I could see that my ideas were well received and that I was really helping people. It was a great feeling.

In August, I spent the month making paper and paper pulp to take to Iceland using the paper pulp made from the Townsville cottons as well as from beach grass which had been washed up during the king tides at home. My climate change projects really started to take shape.

Meanwhile I was still on a high from the Somba Summer School but knew that I would lose my motivation.

So in September I took my next HUGE daring step #6 and that was to triple invest in myself by joining the next level of Sigrun’s coaching, the Momentum program. I was so nervous about whether I had done the right thing I couldn’t even bear to think about it. But my gut instinct kicked in and I knew I had to follow through.

I had already booked to go to the Netherlands for a Paper Art Event, demonstrating making banana paper (a novelty in Europe) and giving a presentation at the Apledoorn museum on my Deluge flood paper artworks. I also attended a committee meeting for the International Association of Paper Makers and Artists, IAPMA (I am the current secretary) and we all came away recharged from this unique get-together, full of strategic plans for the future of the organisation. The plan was to head to Iceland via Geneva after the Netherlands.

We then travelled to a fellow paper artist’s house in Chamonix in the French Alps before heading to Geneva from where my husband flew back to Australia and I travelled on to Iceland by myself. 

My next daring step #7 was to go on a glacier hike and spend eight days in and around Reykjavik getting a feel for the place. It was now October and I headed north on a bus to Skagaströnd to start my artist residency with much trepidation. Would I be OK in a share house full of other artists? Would I measure up? 

I faced a lot of insecurities and issues but every morning I went to work in the shared studio, not knowing exactly what I was doing but knowing from my own experiences that I had to follow my instincts and trust the process. It was really liberating! I shared a house with fantastic artists from all over the world and made art!

Those of you who read my newsletter and social media posts will know the absolute joy and excitement I had while there: making paper, experimenting, being at the lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower and having fun.

Meeting my Icelandic coach Sigrun in Zurich

Fellow house mates at NES artist residency Juli Snyder & Gabriela Conchita making vision boards

My next and most daring step #8 was when I went all out and skipped over to Zurich, Switzerland (as you do when you are that close) to take part in Sigrun’s two-day business entrepreneurial conference. I was so nervous, I had no clothes to wear other than my studio papermaking clothes, no fancy shoes only my sneakers and I knew that everyone else would be dressed to the nines and looking fabulous, as European women do. I thought I would feel uncomfortable and out of place.

How wrong I was, and how welcome they made me feel. I still felt a bit like this weird artist from Australia in amongst hundreds of well-dressed and confident women but somehow I was able to connect with people, talk, listen to their stories and realise we are all in the same boat, seeking to change the world by helping each other and inspiring women all over the world to take action, to believe in themselves, to be bold and daring. 

In November I returned home charged with new confidence in myself as both an artist and business woman, fully integrating my two identities and taking ownership of a new persona. I created work about climate change and glacier melt while in Iceland but on my return to Australia found that New South Wales was burning up with bushfires. All along our local beach was a tideline of soot and burnt leaves washed up from the nearby fires. I started incorporating these elements into my new art works and was very excited to be accepted into an art exhibition on climate change which will be held in Melbourne in February 2020.

I also wanted to make my yearly calendar, based on the success of my 2018 collaged postcard calendar. I looked at what postcards I had brought back from Iceland and realised I had enough to make my 2020 calendar entirely about Iceland. As I had to do them all in one sequence, I decided to document my process and share it as a new online course, Creative Calendars in 7 Days. 

As it nears the end of December and I am on a ‘workation’ (working vacation) down south surrounded by bushfires with my friend Samantha again making more work, dreaming up new projects and getting my online courses organised for 2020.

I’m amazed at where I have come from to where I am now. I can see the path was always circuitous, the beginning and the end completely in accordance with the journey in the middle. This has not been without huge rollercoasters of emotion, downright frustration, sometimes despair but throughout it all I truly believe that I am finding my path, that my mission to make art whilst inspiring and helping fellow creatives is becoming clearer.

I look forward to 2020 with clear vision. 

My 2020 is already planned out  focusing on art, my creativity business and travel of course. They are all interconnected because I have a big vision to take creativity to a large audience. I believe that everyone is creative, that we can all do it if we are supported, encouraged and invested in our own creative self.

This coming twelve months will be filled with more major events including exhibitions, two overseas trips as well as holding my first ever creativity workshops in Iceland in June 2020 for an audience of entrepreneurial women in creative industries. They will be held at HARPA (think Icelandic Guggenheim or Sydney Opera House) on the day after the Sigrun’s Self Made Summit which I am going to with my workshop co-presenter, another Australian woman Carol Robinson who is entrepreneurial in the beauty industry.

There is creativity in all walks of life.

I look forward to sharing my journey along the way, to inspire you to Dare to Create.

Thank-you for reading this epic blog post and Happy New Year!

*** To learn more about SOMBA and the Self Made Summit at Harpa in Reykjavik, check out this amazing event.  

Imagining Peace - October 2019

** This week’s new subscriber winner of the last 2020 desktop calendar is Aline (last name withheld) Congratulations!