Honesty, Insight, & Action

Model Luna Vatra wearing Organic Armor.

For years, I was told never to share old work. The prevailing advice was that showing too much of my creative history would confuse people and weaken the identity of my practice. I listened. Again and again, I removed older work from my website. Projects disappeared as my practice changed, leaving less and less evidence of how one body of work led to another. Eventually, I began to recognize what was being lost.

Longtime followers could no longer find work they remembered, while new visitors encountered only fragments of a much longer practice. More importantly, I had begun allowing outside expectations to determine which parts of my own creative history were worth preserving.

Then came 2020. The combination of the pandemic and cancer radically changed the circumstances in which I was living and working. During treatment, with much of my normal life restricted, I began reconsidering what I wanted my website—and the record of my work—to become.

I stopped thinking about it primarily in terms of followers and analytics. My art had developed through years of experimentation, changes in medium, different places, successes, failures, and unexpected turns. If the website was going to represent my practice, I wanted it to acknowledge that history rather than continually editing it away. I began thinking of the website as a house, renovating it one room at a time. My focus became a portfolio I called Life's Work. I created galleries for projects from different periods of my practice, regardless of medium or whether they resembled the work I was making at that moment. For the first time in years, those earlier works were allowed to exist alongside the person and artist I had become.

The way I document my work has continued to evolve since then. Beginning in 2023, much of that historical record moved from my website into my Artwork Archive, allowing the public website to become more focused while the larger history of the practice remained preserved.

Looking back, that distinction matters.

An artist's current portfolio does not have to contain everything she has ever made. But moving forward doesn't require erasing what came before. Earlier work can remain part of the record—a visible lineage of experiments, decisions, places, materials, and ideas that eventually led somewhere else. The archive and the current practice can serve different purposes.

Both are part of the work.