Two years ago I was not sure I could keep going. I had reached the limit of my mental ability to handle my responsibilities. I was my dad’s full-time caregiver, worked as a tutor (also a type of caregiving), and took care of two chronically ill cats (caregiving), on top of running my art business. I had long known that caregiving was not something I wanted to do with my life, and yet my whole life had become just that. Emptying myself, again and again, for others.

When it came to my art, it was not surprising that I felt stuck and uninspired. I spent my days pulled between my dad’s needs, which were near-constant, and the needs of my students, which filled every gap in my day like water. There was never a moment when I wasn’t needed. So when I sat down to make art, I just felt nothing. I don’t feel like you need to be inspired to make art, but the myth that mental health issues are good for art is an absolute lie. The best thing for art - for creativity - is boredom, not a breakdown.

And so I found myself, one day, sitting the my studio completely unable to make anything. I was finally empty.

There’s a Chuck Close quote I’ve carried around for years:

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”

I may not have been inspired, but I did have a plan.

In my studio I have a cardboard box that I fill with all of the supplies that tried out but I know I will never use. Every year, if the items in the box are untouched, they get donated to either a local arts center for their annual fundraiser/garage sale or to a local High School for their art teachers.

So I dragged out the box and I made the one thing I had been fighting against making for years: miniatures.

I always told myself that I couldn’t make miniatures. People don’t respect them as art, they see them as crafts, and that I’d never be able to make my living off miniatures. So I sat down with a bunch of supplies that I was planning to get rid of and made the one thing I said I was never going to.

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My husband came home from work and I showed him the cardboard cat food tray full of miniatures and shook them around. I said I was going to throw them away, did he want to see them first? He stopped me and said no, don’t throw them away, finish them and see if people like them. When I hesitated, he said that they were his favorite thing I had ever made, and that if he saw them at a craft show, that he could buy one for me immediately. That they were so me.

So I finished them and put photos of two of the first two on my IG stories to test the waters. A regular collector immediately sent me a message asking to buy them. (A huge and special thank you to this collector, for believing in them and giving me a much-needed dose of approval at a critical time.) Someone asked what I called them and I had no idea, but I thought they looked like little landscapes or houses, so I named them the Tiny Terra. I photographed the rest of the series, popped them into my shop during the monthly update, and they found homes within a few hours.

A few months later we moved my dad into an assisted living, a few months after that I quit my job, through it all, the Tiny Terra stuck around.

Over the last two years the Tiny Terra have become the Glue Babies. The thing I thought I wasn’t allowed to make grew into the core of my art practice. Two years later, there are hundreds of Tiny Terra all over the world, and they’re still growing in size, complexity, and technique. They’re nostalgic and whimsical and have just a tiny pinch of darkness. They still carry my core message of rebuilding one’s life in the wake of chronic illness or other calamity. My husband was right, they’re me. And it never occurred to me that people would like something that was just me.

I think sometimes, as artists, we devalue to the things about us that are unique because we get too caught up in what makes other people unique, then think that we don’t measure up in comparison. I think that’s why AI art is so attractive to some people, because it can make images in the style of others, and that’s the only way new artist’s can think of themselves - in the context of others.

It’s when we let go of that thinking, when we dig into the metaphorical box of things we’ve discarded, that we have a chance to find ourselves as artists.