community workshop – analog collage with metallic ink on handmade paper.

The evolution of this workshop began with my personal search to reconcile thoughts and feelings about myself (during a specific period of my life). It was a personal exploration to healing internal places wounded that I became tired of carrying the negative words resurfacing.

Inspired by the traditional Japanese art form Kintsugi, (golden joinery: the art of repairing broken pottery using lacquer and precious gold) all iterations of the Beauty workshop consider our internal breakage and repair as part of the histories of our bodies. As opposed to something that needs to be shamed, hidden or ignored; the process becomes a method for an individual woman to honor and celebrate her whole self shared within a community of other women. The workshop uses a creative process to prompt ideas of positive self affirmations. To date ( 2022) over 100 women have been participants.

The images on this page are the resulting work of women who participated in a Beauty & Pain workshop. I continue to iterate this workshop and to work with cohorts of women throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex and virtually throughout the U. S.