I hope you will visit my "Healing Creatures", an ongoing journey from grief to expanding wings, all with the help of the felted souls birthed in my studio.
The real animals walking around Apifera merge into me and reincarnate themselves in my art. They have strong voices, voices I hear all the time in my head, whether I'm with them or not. My God, they are wise, and entertaining, even in two dimensional form of a drawing.
But like a child cutting figures out of a magazine and trying to make them into paper dolls that can walk, I yearned for my creatures to climb out of the paper and become an entity I could touch, groom and hold.
A beautiful stray cat arrived on my farm three years ago and I set out to pay him homage in a drawing. But I kept seeing my father's face in the cat who had died shortly before. The cat became my father and my father became a felted cat. Soon mice began talking to me.
And then the healing began.
