Jessica Backup

Long time no see! Okay, I was going to start this by saying it had been a while, thinking it was like six months or so since I wrote one of these posts. Well I just checked and last time I did this was in 2018 . EXCUSE ME. What happened to time? Illness and misery, probably, but let’s not talk about that right now! I want to catch you up on what I’ve been making lately. And don’t worry, I’m not going to sum up over a year of creative work, I’m just going to start somewhere. That’s what you gotta do here in life, just start somewhere. I think one of the reasons I didn’t do this in 2019 was that it was a year characterized by creative uncertainty for me. Somewhere along the line I grew tired of what I had been creating, and started craving change. The only thing was that I only knew I wanted to leave what I had been creating – I had no idea where I wanted to go.

So, 2011 was an intense year in my life. I graduated “high school” (it’s always impossible to translate the words for different parts of school so WHATEVER), went on a big trip that we had planned for years and started my first year at university. Nothing after that really went as planned, but that year was filled with so much hope for the future, and so many exciting experiences. One of the best parts of 2011 however was a project I was doing with two of my best friends. We had started a sort of creative group consisting of the three of us, and tried to meet up every now and then for some creative hangouts. We called ourselves “Ljómi”, which was supposed to be “glitter” in Icelandic, but I just discovered it actually means like “glow” and “brilliance”, so… yeah, that went well haha. Still a cute name though! Ljómi was established in 2010, but really flourished in 2011. We started a wonderful project where we each got a wall calendar and at the start of every month we made a collage

So, apparently I started my whole journey with embroidery on painted fabric in January 2018, and I only just finished my first hoop. Heh. I haven’t really been working on it actively, but rather working very slowly whenever I felt like it and whenever I had embroidery meetups with one of my best friends. But I’ve quite enjoyed this very slow way of working, I wrote a post on Instagram just the other day about how social media can make you feel like your creativity has to be fast paced. But I think sometimes it has to be slow. I’d say that the embroidery hoop I finished the other day is one of my favourite things I’ve ever created, and it feels worth every single hour I put into it. I thought I’d walk you along the process a little bit.

Things have been a bit of a struggle lately. I’ve been feeling really insecure about my art, and the changes it’s going under. My art has had a kind of cohesive style for the last 2-3 years. It’s been dark and moody and has looked a lot like space, to pretty much sum it up. This style has given me a lot of things. It gave me my first sales in my shop, it gave me pretty much all of my followers on Instagram and Twitter, and in a way it has given me a lot of friends through the people who I have found through those followers.

It’s been a while! I’ve actually wanted to get back into blogging for a while now, but have had some SERIOUS website trouble (basically everything was down for I think 2 weeks? It was great). But anyway, it’s working now, and I want to talk a little bit about something I’ve been obsessed with lately – collage! I follow a bunch of collage artists on Instagram and have a board filled with collage on Pinterest. I just love it! I’ve also really adored my friend Kelly’s recent adventures with collage , and was really inspired. AND I wanted to create something non-digital. If you know me you know that digital is my main thing, but I’ve recently realised how much I need non-digital things too. I’ve kind of pressured myself to pick one of them in order to focus and specialise, but mixing it up is what keeps me happy, and I learn so many things to transfer from one to the other when I experiment with both! So this is why I started experimenting with something I’ve been meaning to do for ages –

You know like two posts ago, where I was like “I’M LEAVING THE DIGITAL FOR A WHILE”. Well, that “while” wasn’t very long. While I still really want to be creating physically more, I found myself going back to digital creations like within a week of writing that post.