Good question. I figure jumblr will understand why I don't share much public detail about myself; it's for safety, not just privacy, sad as that is to say. On the other hand, my artwork is deeply intertwined with my identity, and I think that's worth sharing.
Glasgow is my home, though not my birthplace; I have family in various different countries. The focus on Scotland in my artwork is because I love Scotland and Scottish art history and history in general. My academic background is mostly in linguistics, though there's a massive overlap with history. A lot of the art you see on Etsy and Shopify is based on specific historic artefacts—Pictish stone carvings, illuminated manuscripts…actually, mostly illuminated manuscripts. Hebrew ones, too, though. (Did you know there were historic Jewish illuminated manuscripts? There are!) Even the simpler designs may contain complex cultural and historic references.
As you might have guessed, I'm a bit of a nerd, and that's a bit of an understatement.
Growing up, my relationship to my Jewishness was very complicated. My Jewish education was self-motivated and largely self-directed for a while. Over the years, I've become much more connected to my community, and I'm incredibly grateful for that. Unsurprisingly, my interests in history and linguistics have integrated quite nicely with this: I've studied Judaism as a religion, but also Jewish folklore, history, art, manuscripts, language and more.
Once again, for safety and privacy reasons, I'm not going to give a comprehensive bullet-point list of identities, but I'll share a few: queer, Jewish, disabled, autistic, COVID-cautious. Being CC is tied into being disabled and Jewish, among other things: as a disabled person, I want to protect my own health, but I also want to protect others from preventable health issues. I believe in harm reduction as an important part of social justice; this is also part of my Jewish values of protecting life and health—it's a matter of shmirat haguf and pikuach nefesh.
CC issues inform my art, too. I've got some works in progress that feature Viatrix Chai's CC flag design, and I'm thinking I might do something similar to my Jewish disability pride designs, like this chai disability flag pendant, or these magen David ones, which incorporate Jewish symbols into the stripes. I'm also going to be listing a whole bunch of mask chains soon:
Because why should a respirator be boring, right?
This has gone on a bit of a tangent, so I'll wrap it up now.
