Welcome to my blog.
From time to time I'm going create posts like these which are more of a polished art journal. I'm sharing my thoughts, my inspiration my evolution of ideas and how they come to form the work I create. I'll also share information about workshops i'm running, new art for sale and general updates. These are also emailed out to my newsletter subscribers so If you would like to receive them straight to your inbox just add your email to the form down the bottom of the page.
To get things started I just wanted to introduce myself and share my background in creativity.
Firstly, this is me Zyanya (pronounced Zye-an-yah). I'm a queer ceramic artist based in the Northern Rivers area of Australia.
I’ve been working with clay for about 8 years but originally my creative interests were in photography and sewing! As a teen I would sew almost all of my own clothes. Some days everything I was wearing I had made. Even my underwear! When I was in year 12 my dad threatened to take my sewing machine away because I was sewing every day and night and not studying. I started learning photography when I was 17 and then after high school I studied it at TAFE and then it was my major when I did my fine arts degree. I loved to work with black and white film and explore alternative processes like developing my film at home with vitamin c powder and instant coffee. I still love taking photos and every now and then I sew myself some fun festival outfits.
But CLAY has my whole body mind and heart. I got into it because I wanted to know how to make everything I owned myself and dreamt of a hand crafted home. As much as I love and have a natural ability for sculptural work I tend to stick with functional objects. The theme that links all of my creativity over my whole life has been a desire to explore and experiment with less common methods but make something functional, beautiful and nice to hold or look at. Colours, textures & aesthetics are very important to my Taurus soul 🌿 The things I loved about photography transferred into the things I love about clay: the initial creative action is almost instant. But then we experiment with a few things here and there and it goes into a hidden realm to ‘develop’ our hands are out of the way and it’s up to something greater and outside of ourselves to let the alchemy happen as what we started with changes state and becomes something new. I love the blending of science and art. Technicalities and spontaneity.
It’s taken me years to really develop my style and truly see myself as an artist. I used to write on my CV that I’m a fast learner but I think I’m actually really slow 😂 As a kid I had a feeling my life would be art based but I really had no idea how. Especially because I was never that great at drawing. What I realised later was that I’m actually very good at 3D forms.
I have run this business of mine as a side hustle for a while now with a little break in the middle. It wasn’t until last year when I took myself REALLY seriously and I gave myself the time and permission to delve into this full time that I found my style truely emerging. It was then that I was like “wait: I AM an artist”. This is just poring out of me like if I didn’t do this I’d actually maybe go insane or be very depressed. I have so many big ideas and dreams and many of them I feel are just kind of sitting in the background waiting for their chance to come out.
It can get really exhausting and confusing having these dreams but still only being at the beginning waiting for more eyes to see me. The best thing I can do is just keep delving and making and getting what’s inside me to the surface. Believing in myself even when I’m over the hustle. When I’m filled with existential dread and thinking about how literally everything I’m doing is a distraction for the fact that one day me and everything around me will not exist. But then the little high dimensional being in my head reminds me that this is what the human life is about. Following my highest excitement. Letting the soul of the world be nourished by following the dreams inside my heart. And that maybe everything I’m overcoming about self worth, self sabotage, learning perseverance, learning time management are all part of my human experience lessons that my higher dimensional soul came here for.
As you can see I’m also very interested in the idea of alien ancestry and playing with the space time continuum and seeing how I can manipulate my world just by feeling into and tuning into a higher frequency 👽
Thank you for being here and I hope you enjoyed learning about me and my mind x