Tell us about your creative work and what we can expect to see at Handmade Hamilton.
I am a drawer, writer, embroiderer, and printmaker. At Handmade Hamilton, I’ll be selling cards, postcards, zines, paper dolls, and prints, made with digital printing as well as more traditional forms of printmaking like silkscreen. In my writing, drawings, and prints, I tend to focus on the minutia of my daily life, but I like to mix it with elements of folklore or magic.
What are some of your favourite podcasts or music to listen to when you create?
If I’m struggling to get through a print run when I’m screen-printing, I like to put on Kate Bush’s album, The Dreaming. It has so much wild energy and I love picturing Kate Bush making that when she was so young with this incredible level of confidence.
What are your favourite books?
I couldn’t choose just one or two so I made a list of ten.
1. We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
2. Here - Wislawa Szymborska
3. Everything by Jane Austen
4. Everything by Kazuo Ishiguro
5. Tess of the D’Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
6. The Gorgeous Nothings - Emily Dickinson (a beautiful collection of her handwritten poems on envelopes and scrap papers)
7. The Witch’s Handbook - Malcolm Bird (a children’s book from 1984 with no narrative or real information but amazing, amazing illustrations)
8. All the Harry Potter books
9. Everything illustrated by Arthur Rackham
10. The Colossus - Sylvia Plath
If you have any advice for any emerging artisans what would it be?
I think that if you want to be able to make things as your full-time or part-time job, you need to treat it like a job. Keep a regular work schedule. Have a designated work space. Set deadlines for yourself. But I also think this has to be balanced with a certain level of flexibility that allows you to be creative. You don’t want to become a production line. You want to make things that are exciting to you. Sometimes this means getting an idea at midnight, working on it all night, and throwing off your whole schedule.
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