The weight of everything

Some weeks arrive quietly. Others crash down all at once, like a wave you didn’t see building until it’s already over your head.

This week has been that kind of week. A long time coming if were honest.

Between working multiple jobs, finishing commissions, (both professional and small side projects), trying to build my art business, submitting applications for markets, and keeping up with university and college coursework, everything has begun to fold in on itself. My days feel packed so tightly they blur together. Every list I write seems to grow instead of shrink. And the studio, which is usually the one place I can breathe, has started to feel like another clock ticking in the background.

I’ve barely had the time to catch up with life, let alone sit down and create the pieces I had originally planned for this semester.

And then there was the meeting with my mentor recently.

I had proposed a jewellery series, silver and copper pieces inspired by the paintings I created last semester using minerals and sediments I had collected myself. It felt like a natural continuation of the work. The materials, the landscape, the physical matter of the earth finding its way into wearable forms, all communicating with each other.

It felt personal. Grounded. Honest.

But the proposal was shut down.

Not violently, not dramatically even, but in that quiet academic way that somehow cuts deeper. The kind of conversation where your ideas slowly get picked apart until you leave wondering if you misunderstood your own work in the first place.

Since then I’ve been stuck in this strange mental spiral of trying to reshape the idea, to twist it, stretch it, translate it into something that sounds more like “fine art.” Something that fits the language and expectations of the course. Something that can survive the critique without being dismissed.

But honestly, right now, that thought alone makes my chest feel tight.

Trying to dance around that particular minefield, manipulating my ideas, dressing them up in the right words, bending them into the right shape, feels exhausting in a way I don’t have the energy for.

And when I sat down in the studio, staring at blank canvases I feel would compensate for all of this, I realised something important.

If I force myself to paint right now, the work will come from pressure, not from truth.

So instead, I’m allowing myself to step sideways.

For this semester, I’m creating one sculpture.

The piece will be a figure of a girl, loosely a likeness of myself, caught in a moment of emotional overwhelm. She will be kneeling on the ground, clutching her head, her body curling inward as if trying to contain something too heavy to hold. Her head will begin to phase into the floor beneath her, dissolving slowly into the surface, as though the weight of everything around her is pulling her down and out of herself.

It’s the closest visual form I can find for how this week and life has felt.

Like being slowly swallowed by pressure.

But choosing sculpture also feels like something else entirely.

It feels like coming home.

Sculpture was where my love for art began. Before the theories and the critiques and the language of “fine art,” there was simply the act of shaping something with my hands. Weight, texture, form. A physical conversation with the material.

I still love painting. I always will.

But lately it has started to feel like something being pushed onto me, something I’m expected to produce, rather than something I’m naturally moving toward. And when creativity becomes obligation, it quietly drains the life out of it.

The idea of sculpting again feels different.

Slower. Heavier. More instinctive.

Like grounding myself again after being pulled too far into the noise.

So instead of forcing paintings to make up for my jewellery, there will be one sculpture.

One figure carrying the stress, the pressure, the exhaustion, and maybe, somewhere inside the process of making it, a small sense of balance again.

I hope after all this I manage to find some peace of mind and ultimate catch up with everything on my mind.

With love and minerals,

Ellie Jane