Throughout my history as an artist, I have juggled the dichotomy between being a perfectionist well past the point of detriment and recognizing that art was my constant outlet to freely express my creative drive and my emotions. In childhood, my imagination was very active but my visions for each new project I began were rigid. For every construction paper drawing I completed, a graveyard of crumpled up “failed” attempts rested at my feet. My sketchbooks rapidly grew thinner and thinner because I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing my mistakes anymore. Anxiety was a constant presence throughout the entire making of a piece or project yet at any given moment I would not hesitate to wax poetic about how the creative process brought me tranquility and joy like no other. It wasn’t until my first ceramics course at university that I was taught that perfectionism perhaps wasn’t an asset, which directly contradicted what I’d been taught my whole life leading up to that moment.

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I struggle greatly with the motivation to physically create work, and the best mechanism I have found to counteract this struggle is by making sure that there is a strong emotional connection to whatever I create. Throughout high school and the beginning of my artist career at university, I felt the need to expend a great amount of emotional labour into my work, but my most recent work has been reflective of my goal to reconnect with the childlike joy that I experienced in the making process. It has also been a working goal of mine to unpack and unlearn my perfectionistic tendencies and not let that be a hindrance to that feeling of pure joy and playfulness.