The Lady with the Scissors

The relationship I have with my scissors has grown alongside my personal evolution from a hobbyist to an upcoming local artist. I am the artist behind Lady Brock Studio, and I make intricate cut and paste collage compositions from mostly reusable materials. The topics of my art include intersectionality, post-modern feminism, and tongue-in-cheek explorations of pop-culture through my very personal style.

This journey began during my clinical internship in graduate school. I was doing technical assistance for an Art Therapist at a local hospital during her groups for tween and teen patients. When I joined the program, these groups were in the middle of a big collage project. As in, fill up a whole book, making pieces on each of the archetypes, their cultural variations, and more, big. To further build relationships with the patients, I brought in my own blank graph paper notebook and started doing the ‘assignments’ with them when I wasn’t up helping pass out scissors and notebooks or piles of old magazines. I discovered that this practice of journaling the unspeakable or the difficult via the visible was intrinsically healing, yet magically revealing.

Although assisting with that group only lasted for one of the semesters of my graduate program, over the next two years I filled up that notebook. I was beginning a process of continuous loops of feedback where I would make unprompted art based solely on what felt ‘right’ in the moment and when each piece was complete, I would sit and have a ‘conversation’ with it. Most artists have a stage of the process known as completion, or examination; but this was a bit beyond that. I call it a conversation because the symbols that I end up recognizing in my finished pieces are often rich statements and deep insights into myself that I never could have explained to anyone before I had ‘listened’ to the piece. This was a new way of being honest with myself about myself and this honestly called me into action where I had been complacent in areas of my life.

Flipping through that first notebook, you can see my personal style as an artist coagulate before your eyes. The pieces move from chaotic and lacking, sometimes literally unable to cover all the blank space of an 8.5x11 page to bodacious, unctuous compositions sporting what would become the signature vintage/bohemian/haute style of Lady Brock Studio. In the final year of my three-year program, I began to create outside of the notebook. I discovered that allowing myself more space invited even more depth and created a new level of intricacy. Prizing up lace edges, curls of hair, or coils of an octopus’ tentacle was a challenging hands-on school of skill that began with many mistakes and tears of frustration and ended with many ‘wow’s and long, silent stares as others entered into their own conversations with my art.

After finishing my master’s degree, I decided that I needed to start doing something with all the 11x17 pieces that were quickly consuming the wall space of my bedroom. I felt that to be faithful to those ‘conversations’ that I had to invite the rest of the world. Lady Brock Studio was born as a simple social media page with a seller’s site link and only one series of 12 compositions available. Two years and 7 or 8 series later, I have had the pleasure of guest speaking at Brown University on the use of visual arts for personal journaling and wellness, facilitated countless community groups on collage as a window to the interpersonal universe, and even been selected for a few art shows around the U.S.

I have sold very little prints and even fewer originals; but that’s totally fine with me because I didn’t set out to make a ‘side-hustle’ or to become a famous artist. I get the privilege of being a local artist who invites her community to have a meaningful conversation with themselves through the window of my creations. Any funds that my art does generate go right back into the creative cycle to buy things like stacks of used magazines at thrift stores, bundles of vintage postcards at garage sales, and very importantly galactic quantities of double stick tape. Through this journey my relationship with scissors has been the difference between ‘good’ art and impactful art. I will not call my own art great, but I believe that the intricacy and interaction of layers that I have been able to explore is what helps viewers get lost with themselves in a composition and then have amazing things to share when they come back.

I’m deeply aware of the privilege involved in having enough free time to pursue a hobby that costs any amount of money and of the amount of luck to have been born into a social context where I have the technological means to share my art online; but take all of that away and it still comes down to my scissors. Even if I was dumpster diving or soliciting free materials (believe me, dentists’ offices are a great place to start) and making homemade glue, my scissors are the transformative tool that create the building blocks of compositions necessary to create the level of intimacy viewers experience with Lady Brock Studio originals. Above all, I am profoundly grateful for the increased meaning, curiosity, and exploration that this journey means for my life.