Metamorphosis and the state of wintering

I'm in my creative hibernation era.

wintering

Winter this year is what I remember proper Northeast winters to be. Days of menacing cold, with the kind of unforgiving wind that leaves a lingering sting across your cheeks. The next big potential storm always looms; the forecast teases it weekly, but the big one never quite drops.

Snow was such an infrequent sighting these past few years in NYC that we’d plead to the weather gods for a glimpse of it, just so that we can remember what it was like to walk out the door into a blanket of white and calm our unease about how abnormal it was that it never snowed anymore. Nobody loves the dirty mounds of week-old snow kicked to the curbs. The first dusting that makes the city resemble the movies, however, is worth the black slush.

I always try and walk to Prospect Park (first photo) when it snows. The arch (2nd photo) in the distance commemorates Civil War veterans.

So, we’ve had snow this winter. Maybe not the huge storms that I remember from childhood, but it’s been snowing. I haven’t even minded the relentless cold, but it’s easy for me to say because I can count on both hands how many times I left my apartment in January. Yes, I know. But I’m calling it hibernation.

When my youngest child left for college last fall, I had all the best intentions. I was finally going to pursue creative projects that I had put off for the sake of career building, money chasing, and children raising. What happened instead when I finally had the mental space, was that I reached deep inside and still came up empty. I could blame it on the dark turn of political events in our country or I can blame it on grief. Mourning the loss of an identity as a parent as I’ve defined it for the past twenty years sounds dramatic, but it is a type of grief and I’m here to tell you that it is. If that still doesn’t sound convincing, then at least you can agree that it’s a huge life adjustment and one that has no timeline to overcome—just like grief. See what I mean?

Do you remember last year when I posted a new drawing every week? It was a 2024 thing to hold myself accountable. I was consistent for the first half of the year, but then I took a break in August when we went traveling. I failed to pick up where I left off. My 18 year old even bought me a beautiful travel sketchbook as a gift and I packed my pencils and pens, only to come home with an empty book that I never even opened.

metamorphosis

That latter half of 2024 was painful. I keep thinking about a time-lapse video of a plump green caterpillar that’s been making the rounds on social. The one where it goes into complete metamorphosis as it transforms itself into a butterfly. It’s a truly bizarre sequence to watch, in the way that many nature videos elicit awe. The most startling part is when it thrashes about to shed its final caterpillar skin to reveal a chrysalis—but it only seems violent because the video is sped up and shown upside down. From this disorienting view, the narrative is one of struggle between endings and beginnings.

I don’t want to overplay the metaphor of a caterpillar and puberty or its parallel counterpart, a caterpillar and menopause. It’s been done. They are both about transformation. But there’s something analogous there that’s fitting, down to the end of the cycle when the newly formed butterfly flies away from its encasement. We are all chasing freedom, after all, even if our idea of what freedom is differs.

A few months ago, I saw an old friend who I hadn’t seen in ten years and the inevitable question of what I was up to came up. I still don’t even know how to answer this question. When I told her I had stepped back from my career, her eyes grew big.

“You?” She exclaimed, incredulous.

She knew me during the height of my breadwinning years and didn’t recognize this person who claimed to be done with overworking. I hardly recognize her myself. All of the personality traits that defined me then, that I leaned on to push our lives forward and hid behind like armor to bury all the things that I didn’t want to face, became exposed when I let the armor fall away. Ambitious, driven, a goal-oriented overachiever. But in the end, what are they except words like a caterpillar skin that molts away during metamorphosis?

hibernation

I can’t help but wonder if this state of creative stasis is in defiance to how life now moves at lightning speed. Maybe this is my own personal resistance. The key to surviving the changing landscape of work is to keep pushing forward: adapt, reinvent, upskill, produce, commodify, sell. What if my body and mental spirit is rejecting all of that and telling me to just sit still for once?

Some recent floral watercolor sketches

Even those weekly drawings I posted were made because I needed to prove something. That I could still keep a promise. But I didn’t find what I was looking for at the end of that process.

And this is where I got it all wrong. I was still chasing after something I could commodify even if it was just for this newsletter. Whether as a writer, content creator, or artist, I’ve been creating for consumption for so long that I lost sight of what I actually enjoyed about making.

We’ve become so accustomed to seeing process videos, work-in-progress sharing, and how-to tutorials that the magic of creating and designing might have lost its luster for me a bit. We were so eager to show the process. To be transparent about it all. To prove again and again that there was value in the work that we did, and that good work took time.

I appreciate how process became less precious. I was no longer afraid to show the messiness, but there still wasn’t enough room for ugliness and mistakes—not when time and budgets are attached. Maybe experimentation would better thrive with the return of a little mystery and secrecy, much like the biological magic that occurs inside the chrysalis when the caterpillar’s body breaks down and reshapes itself into a butterfly.

Yesterday, I walked into one of the kid’s unoccupied bedrooms and set a huge pile of paper and ephemera on a desk. I picked up a pair of scissors and started to cut paper. I didn’t have an idea or a plan, but just kept cutting and cutting and letting the pieces fall randomly. I think I’m searching for something meaningful in this meaningless mess of cuttings. Instead of satisfying that creative itch by watching a video of how others work, or pinning inspiration after inspiration, we can only grow if we do that work ourselves. An hour later, I walked away and left the mess behind.

The very definition of hibernation is an energy conserving state of wintering. It’s transitional, not meant to be permanent, though the duration can fluctuate in response to how much recharging a body needs. And so, I’m reframing this period of dormancy as creative hibernation, knowing that there’s an emergence—eventually.

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Related reading

My career ambitions have left the building

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An arty roundup of links this week

An exhibition worth seeing if you’re in NYC:

• Nick Cave: Amalgams and Graphts (Jack Shainman Gallery)
  Quite the perfect exhibit to break my hibernation. Nick Cave’s bronze sculptures cast from the artist’s body is the centerpiece here, but the real draw, in my opinion, are the mixed-media panels of vintage trays, floral metal bric-a-brac, and hand-embroidered needlepoint. Read more about the exhibit here.

  

  

  

To read:

• Threads of resistance - Knitting and embroidery are laden with stereotypes of domestic femininity – and the subversive potential for protest. (Aeon)
  “Im so angry I stitched this just so I could stab something 3,000 times’ is a statement cross-stitched by the artist Shannon Downey.”

• An Artist Expands the Landscape of Sound - In a major show at the Whitney, Christine Sun Kim shines light on Deaf culture and measures sonic experience beyond the ear. (NY Times)
  Planning to see this show next.

• The Art of Wintering: How to Find Strength in Slowing Down (Ness Labs)
  “Definition of wintering: The act of withdrawing from the world to focus on one’s inner world; active acceptance of dark and cold times; a form of calm resilience.”

Two artist interviews:

• Katrin von Lehmann: Drawing with Rules (Between Science and Art)
  A conversation about the artist’s many scientific and philosophic references, which are often reflected in her work through structured, research-based processes that intersect scientific methodology and artistic expression.

• 'We are all connected with an invisible line' – in conversation with Chiharu Shiota (Designboom)
  One of my favorite artists. Shiota is a Berlin-based Japanese artist whose large-scale installation work explores themes of mortality, motherhood, and the fragile uncertainty of life cycles. If you’re in Paris, go to her exhibition at the Grand Palais for me, please!