Tailor

Working as a creative type within very stratified and formal industries has been an adventure and a half.  Not much need for cartoons or floristry in the spheres I operated in when I was in my 20’s.

Instead, I was shepherding Sea Cadets through training exercises and streaking plates in the lab.   

Digging these photos up and realizing they’re 20 years old gave me yet another grey hair

I really liked every place I worked, but knew it wasn’t quite right.  I kept pecking away, tailoring my skillset for a job I hadn’t even heard of at the time.  I just knew I wanted to work with colour and design, and the side job was the easiest way to accomplish it.

Still super proud of these logos, but now I need to bust out of my shell

I spent the last 20 years acquiring these skills, but it was to produce results for other people’s needs. I missed laboratory work, but not the long night shifts and biohazards, or cracked hands from endless washing as I left and entered sterile areas. I missed playing around in colour pickers endlessly, but not the sometimes-frustrating back and forth cycles with clients who focused on what they hated but could not verbalize. Those experiences made me who I am, taught me many valuable lessons, but now I want to make art for myself.

Sure, I have sold paintings and put things on social media, but I’m not a real art-artist, I only went to health tech programs.  I grew up in the heyday of Photoshop CS2, slightly ahead of my peer group in terms of graphic design ability but nothing outstanding, I just learned what I needed for every job on the fly and spent nights and weekends reading tutorials and following videos.  I never took a university-level class about mixing colours, I went to the library and bookmarked links from 1996-2024 until I knew the difference between RGB and CMYK like the back of my hand and how to explain to a client why their "I want this exact blue" is a bad idea.

  An artist I am in awe of shared this meme recently and I felt SEEN.

Ok, so I can make art but I’m not fine-arts degree type of artist.

That’s fine, I love making things using fussy, complicated processes and testing theories using the scientific method.  I started in microbiology as a lab assistant and worked my way up to Senior Clinical Application Specialist on Surgery and Anesthesia.  If I slip up and call my work “coding” immediately a bunch of people will speak up and remind me that it’s actually just configuration. What I do is not considered programming, I never learned C++, I just build & script the forms and giant displays that are used in every surgery in every hospital across the province using logic trees built out with data points. Not programming.

Unfortunately, between a mortgage and kids I never found time to finish that degree, and unlike many of the people I work with daily, that means that a masters and PhD is still currently out of my grasp so I’m not a credentialed scientist (yet). Amateur!

Amateur Scientist: I love it when someone hands me a lab coat when I'm on site.  Feels correct.

What am I then? My job title for the past decade has changed occasionally as I climbed the ranks, but up for the last ten years until very recently it always ended in the same word - “analyst.”

So, I did what I felt I was qualified to do – analyze.

 I started thinking about why I like the things that I like.

What are my interests, and how can I pursue them to make art? What can’t I do yet, and why can’t I do it?

What is holding me back or making me feel like I don’t have anything worth contributing? Worse, why am I afraid of being judged for what I’m interested in?

True of nearly every root cause analysis, diagrams with overlapping themes start to form. Out of a list of 14 hobbies (the only one I was actively pursuing at the time being “nature walks” (yikes) a pattern emerged. 

What do I like about the things I like? Why do I like them?? Where do I take this?

I like plants and rocks and animals and paint and graphic design.

I like those things because they are colourful, and the properties that make them colourful are interesting to me. Colour and its use within industrial design or fashion is endlessly fascinating.  Almost all my interests can be tied back to the pursuit of knowledge in relation to colour and its applications.

I like working in the lab, process mapping, dangerous chemicals, anatomy and animation because the interplay of form vs. function vs. risk over time makes my brain fizz.

Complex ideas with lots of moving parts that you need to carefully plan in order to execute or be ready to document its failure as a learning experience.

You wanna be happy? Tailor your entire life to pursue your interests in an achievable way.  Simple, right?

Ah, art and science. Back to square one.

This time, though, I looked at my interests through a new lens. I have produced all these amazing things and immersed myself into projects using scientific principles, pursued targeted credentials in the areas that interested me or that I felt I could further my career. No letters behind my name, but a long trail filled with bursts of learning, growth and hard work that led to achievements anyone should be proud of.

That night, I picked an item from the list of things I had written out that I was interested in but didn’t know much about/hadn’t tried. Arid plants. 

Cacti.  Spikey buggers that don’t grow easily near my latitude and despite my green thumb, die under my care. They hate me.

Anyone who has had the unfortunate luck of asking me about a plant has seen their own doom reflected back in the glint of my eye as I survey my latest victim. “How long can she talk about petioles,” they surely wonder 20 minutes later as I launch into another diatribe, relating that the stems found in the Lamiaceae family are square. How fun! 

It makes food taste good and has a SQUARE STEM what more could you ask for

All that is to say, mint species are really cool and I know a lot about plants. But I don’t know everything about all kinds of plants, and the fact that there are plants I don’t know about yet and can’t cultivate bothers me.  It also happened to be the first thing that popped into my head so the item was at the top of the list. I can’t keep a cactus or succulent alive to save my life (except for the one scraggly Kalanchoe a special person gave me when I was having a rough time), so I knew very little about Arid plants in general.

That is something I could easily change, let’s hit the internet!

Within an hour I was deep down the rabbit hole of why prickly pear cacti turn that gorgeous shade of milky blue tinged with magenta, sketching and making swatches with markers in a book that had been on the shelf untouched for over two years. What if I used this list of things I don’t know, things I can’t do yet - and pushed myself to create things as I learn how?  Pretty things?

Item #2 on the list was Costuming.  Fabulous, over the top costuming like you’d see in a fantasy movie, or on a Club Kid in 90’s NYC. I can wear whatever I want.  I could post it online!

However, despite being on its 6th season at the time RuPaul’s Drag Race was still seen as subversive by the mainstream.  And again, although they’ve spent their lives loving me for who I am and encouraging their odd little daughter her whole life, my parents probably wouldn’t be thrilled. I was under a new firecracker of a boss who was an unknown entity (she’s no longer my boss but we are friends) …  There were lots of reasons not to do this. 

So What?  Why not stick those two ideas together and see what came out?

 Put this on your head, can it be a hat?

I sketched the idea for the headdress on the splash page of this website as a result of that Why Not try something for myself?

Based off of my lack of knowledge around a type of plant and a desire to create wearable art, I conceptualized something more unique than anything I’d made before, and up to that point I thought I had made some “interesting” things. 

A month later the majority of my friends at the crafting retreat smiled politely, interested in the horned and spiked creation I was cobbling together in my corner of the cabin basement.  “But where will you even wear it?” they asked. 

Like my friend Iza with Michelle Obama, I also had an event where I was meeting a celebrity.  Everyone’s eyebrows shot up into their hairlines as I worked through the weekend, producing a set of falsies that made it look like a second set of tiny hands were growing out of each nail bed.  “You’ll wear those too?”

Beginning a longstanding tradition of making anatomy-related art at the annual scrapbooking/crafting retreat

The polite smiles crystallized a little further as I explained, with increasing internal panic as I noticed their expressions, that the Drag Queen I intended on giving them to had a recurrent in-joke about "tiny hands." I would give these creepy things to someone and they would like them. Probably. Maybe.

“You’re… giving those to someone off reality TV?  I don’t get it, but you do you.  What if your boss sees?” My heart sank again at the thought of being too weird for corporate life but I was determined.  I will say that was one person out of 10 on that trip.  The rest were mostly confused but supportive.  Drag Race was still mainly followed LGBTQ+ people and this was a retreat for married women to get away from their families and do their own thing. 

I don’t make a habit of befriending small-minded people.  I was surrounded by encouragement, my ideas were still welcome, just new! They just wanted to know what the heck I was making. But could I wear this thing out in public?  9/10 of those friends told me to go for it.

I did.  I wore the headdress to a bar to meet that Queen, it fell apart in my hands on the way home because I didn’t know how to construct it properly and I was HAPPY.

She liked the nails, or at least she said she did.  I handed them over; Katya squealed before rolling on the floor, which is a very Katya Thing to Do.  We chatted until the line handler barked at me that the next group was still waiting. This faux-Russian, intellectual, incredibly creative, weirdo like myself wanted those nails.

I think she enjoyed the gift even if I never saw her wear them; I don’t care if they ended up in a dumpster before her plane took off the next day, when you gift art, you let it go entirely. I got a fun memory out of it, and my friend and I shrieked like schoolgirls in the Parkade after the event.  It was amazing. I knew I was on to something I really wanted to pursue. Cont'd.