Establishing inclusivity in the arts, outdoors, and mental health (and having one hell of a good time doing it).
My name is Julianna, I’m in my 30’s, married, child-free, and I have absolutely no idea what I am doing so I’m just gonna fuck around and find out. Join me, won’t you?
While I was trying to figure out what made me happy outside of my relationships with others, I began painting because when I was a kid I loved to paint, or draw, or anything that allowed me to use colors and maybe get a bit messy. I began with painting Hydroflasks for family and friends because I wanted people to have art even if they didn’t have walls to hang it on. I would buy thermoses from REI garage sales (people often return them even if they just need a new lid) or people would give me the thermoses that they already had so that there wouldn’t be too much more waste in the world.
In 2020, I decided to switch to painting canvases, from painting exclusively mountains to women with flowers coming out of their heads.
It felt like each one was a piece of me because I had so many ideas and opinions flowing out of my head that I couldn’t understand them. They also brought color, beauty, and focus to an extremely difficult season of my personal life. While I was painting these beautiful women and flowers, I was in a deep depression, in severe physical pain from my endometriosis and adenomyosis, and wanted nothing more than to curl up and die. The colors in my paintings were at odds with my drawings and fantasies of knives and simply cutting my body open to stop the hurt. When I couldn’t paint another happy, beautiful flower or woman, a friend sent me a link to sign up for a linoleum printing festival. Still in that deep depression, I signed up and promptly forgot about it. I was simply trying to survive.
I had shared a part of my story with that piece and everyone seemed to understand me and see me in that moment.
A week or two later, I got an email saying I’d been chosen to participate. My first thought was, “fuck. I don’t know how to do this!” and then I laughed hysterically because all of a sudden I was picking up a 36”x36” piece of linoleum, a carving tool, and a pack of band-aids, with no idea how to proceed. It wasn’t until the night before the due-date, when I had already finished the piece, that I watched a few youtube videos on how to carve linoleum. You know, to see if I’d done it right. Then, when the first print of ‘Find OUT’ was finally peeled up after months of carving and caring, and I saw the finished piece hanging there, and everyone stilled around me, I knew that something in me was shifting. I had told a part of my story with that piece and everyone seemed to understand me and see me in that moment. They also, somehow, saw themselves in that work. A few months later, I couldn’t shake that feeling I got when I first saw myself in ‘Find OUT’ and another idea started taking form, I should make sure everyone feels seen, I should show other outdoor activities and remind everyone that they belong in the outdoors, that they deserve to be in the outdoors. With that simple idea, a whole collection was born, along with so many more collections. I’m nowhere near done with linoleum printing, and I’m so thankful that for one moment in a depressive episode I ignored the sad voice, and chose to at least try.
I’ve since pulled out of that deep depressive episode, and was finally able to have surgery to help with my endometriosis and to cure my adenomyosis.
I use mountain biking to cope with everything because it’s the only time my brain is empty, it’s the only time my anxiety stops completely, it’s the only time I’m not aware of what I look like, but instead I am aware of how strong I am.
