Art as a Way Back to Myself
In 2022, I began making a body of work that later came to be called The Untamed Project. At the time, it did not feel like a project. It felt like triage. The world was loud. My home was unstable. The culture outside my windows was speaking in arguments rather than sentences. Inside, my own life was carrying its private fractures. I was not trying to make art. I was trying to stay honest enough to keep breathing.
The work emerged without an outline or ambition. I did not sit down with a theme in mind. I sat down with accumulation: paper scraps, half-written notes, fragments of earlier paintings, things I would usually clean away. They matched the way I felt—pieced together, interrupted, not quite resolved. I kept them. I worked directly on them. I let the surface remain uneven because my own thinking was uneven.
Around that time, I was reading Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. Her image of the cheetah raised in captivity stayed with me—an animal trained to circle a small track while its instincts slept. It felt uncomfortably familiar. I began to see how much of my life had been organized around being palatable: how I spoke, how I stayed quiet, how I tried to make situations smoother for everyone else before asking what they were doing to me.
Outside my studio, things were breaking in visible ways: family conflict, political anger, social pressure that felt more like performance than dialogue. Even our physical living space was damaged, unsettled. Inside, something similar was happening. The more chaos I watched, the more I understood that control had become a habit, not a value. Peace, I realized, was not going to arrive through perfection. It would arrive through alignment.
So I stopped cleaning the work.
The process for The Untamed Project became instinctive. I worked fast. I worked emotionally. I used scraps and archival remnants because they already carried history—they did not pretend to be blank. There was no plan for where anything should land. Paint moved the way feeling does: not neatly, not obediently. I followed it. This was not about the product. It was about staying present long enough for something honest to show up.
At the time, I did not think in therapeutic language. I was not diagnosing myself. But looking back, the work resembled experiential practice. It bypassed the analytical part of my brain and went directly to sensation. I was not trying to solve anything. I was trying to feel without editing. The body knows before the mind does. Art gave me a way to listen.
Many of the early pieces were reactive. They carried anger, grief, fear, and a sense of being unheard. The world felt unstable, and so did I. But something shifted as I kept working. I began to notice that reacting was not the same as living. If I wanted peace in the world, I had to practice it privately. If I wanted truth in public, I had to allow it in myself. The studio became less a place of protest and more a place of alignment.
Each piece started recording small internal decisions: where I stopped pretending, where I admitted something uncomfortable, where I chose presence over performance. The work began to document a quieter change, less about rage and more about responsibility.
The Untamed Project is not tidy. It was never meant to be. It holds emotion the way real life does: layered, unresolved, alive. It marks the moment I stopped organizing my life around approval and started organizing it around attention.
Glennon Doyle writes about living uncaged. For me, that did not look dramatic. It looked private. It looked like a mess—allowing contradiction, allowing myself to occupy space without apologizing for it.
This project became a way back to myself. Not to a better version. Not to a fixed version. Just to a truer one.
If the work offers anything outward, I hope it is permission: permission to feel without performance, to be unfinished, to stop circling the small track we were trained to run, and remember what movement actually feels like.
Not louder. Not perfect. Just untamed enough to be real.
