An unexpected journey
A recent near death experience has brought me full circle.
In high school, there were the academic kids, the jocks, the theatre kids—and then there was me. I found my safe and imaginative place in the art studio and rarely ventured out. I took every art course on offer and inspired teachers to craft new art classes to meet my insatiability.
After high school, I pursued what was then called “commercial design” so as to avoid ending up, as my father warned, a “starving artist.” Soon after graduation, I was lucky to be hired at a design studio above one of the oldest print shops in the greater Vancouver area and learned the trade as the entire industry shifted to digital media. I worked for large corporate design agencies in Vancouver for more than a decade, in every role from junior designer to art director. This work would be the foundation for Brand-Her, the agency I created from my new home base in Squamish, BC upon the arrival of my two children.
Brand-Her was created so that I could be proud of my work, every day, and bring creative ways of thinking and professionalism to entrepreneurs and organizations that lacked the budgets to work with big design agencies. This work has grown and re-focused on select corporate and private clients as well as long-term preferred supplier contracts but remains grounded in artistic exploration and high-level organization.
This shift meshes perfectly with my commitment to making space to develop my work as an artist—to allow the time and space to put my brush to canvas and explore the world through form, colour, and concept. I’m not only still that teenager who found a home in the school studio, but I’m also that solitary kid, deep in her own imaginary worlds—with a love of paper and art supplies to keep me company. For me, art has always been connected to making sense of an often unpredictable world.
In the Spring of 2021, I experienced a near death trauma and my first ever, real medical emergency. As I lay in my hospital bed, I had little energy to do anything except watch the green curtain between me and the next patient gently flutter. Not knowing if I would awake every morning gave me pause to think about the journeys I had taken in my 40-something years, what I might regret missing out on and what I would make of my future, should I survive...
I now gratefully look again to my creative impulse to launch me—and my business—into the next adventure. A fresh and empathetic perspective where the legacy of my work and art comes into sharper focus.
"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." —Joan Didion