My Creative World Won Over Depression by Abigail

 

I spent most of my time with my Grandma until the age of 8 when she sadly died. She had been a seamstress all her life and my days with her would involve tipping out all her fabric scraps and buttons and threads and trailing them about the house. Without her ever teaching me anything I absorbed all these things and the work that she did and they became a part of what was very natural to me.
 
I was too young to understand what her death meant to me and it was a great many years before I truly realized the affect losing someone so important to me from birth had had on me.
 
I suffered with depression for a long time without knowing there was something wrong with me. Brought about through my nervous tendencies, stress with exams at school, the pressures I put upon myself and the huge insecurities I felt, it went on for years before I understood there were things making me feel that way and that really underneath it all there was someone who wanted to be happy, someone who wasn't all the things they were feeling.
 
 

I pursued an education in the arts because for me that's all there ever was and it's always been something that made me feel good, the area, if any, that I could feel confident in.
I finished my degree, freelanced, traveled, worked in a full time job...but felt somewhat unhappy still and hit a level where the unhappiness and the pain it caused me couldn't go on any longer.

I found a form of therapy that started to help me through all my issues and helped me formulate a plan to get myself into a more positive place for myself.

I left my job to bravely go it alone as an artist, working through exhibitions and commissions I had secured and gradually building up into taking on a studio so I wouldn't be alone each day.
What I am doing is still very stressful but pushing myself to do it all benefits me in so many wonderful ways. I gain so much confidence each day that new work comes in or someone writes to me to thank me for making my art. When I reflect on what I spend my days doing I can't believe my luck! I get to express myself through a medium which ties me to my childhood and to the Grandma I loved so so dearly.
 
 

My creative world is one filled with happiness and positively. It's bright and colorful, quirky and playful and what I love the most about it is that making it doesn't just make me happy it has brought joy to so many other people as well.
 

Abigail Brown is a textile artist and illustrator based in London. Mostly her work depicts animals, sculpted from fabric and embellished with hand stitch. She uses both new and recycled fabrics which she collects for their colors, patterns and textures.

Comments

[phillipa]

I love Abigail's work. Her sculptures are an inspiration.