K'rmapet Print

Moving from a small beach side town in Maine to the wilds of Jersey City Heights was a change to say the very least. This was a place as foreign to me as another country, in which the inhabitants spoke another language I didn't understand, which truthfully, they do here. To help my transition I focused on the things I love, plants and nature in general. In grandiose view of New York City I began to wonder how any thing thrived here. My local park strewn with trash and the air rank with the smell of the recycling plant at the bottom of the cliff we sat upon. Then I looked. I took an honest look around and realized, the animals and plants were thriving here, in fact they were taking this park back. It took me back to my childhood in an even smaller town in Maine, when my Mother told me that fairies lived wherever plants grew. Then I began my real look around, thinking about what an urban faerie would look like? In the woods they wore what was around them, so here, why would they not wear what was around them here? It was not enough for my creations to wear things that looked like urban items, they had to wear discarded items, things people would call trash suddenly became treasures to me, much as they would to a faerie. So my fairies have taken on the true spirit of recycling, actually utilizing bits and pieces of nature around them, whether they be nature made or man made, a treasure is a treasure. Now I started to walk everyday seeing things from their point of view. Noticing that ring of metal sitting in the brilliant green grass. That page of newspaper dancing and rolling down the hill. The twists and turns of the jasmine vine around the rusting iron fence. A bright string of beads hiding in the depths of that incessant weed breaching the crack in a sidewalk. It all became inspiration, as though the faerie folk themselves called on me to bring them to life.