As fall approaches and I prepare to make my annual batch of oyster shell pumpkins, I find myself thinking about where all of this started.
Like most children, I loved making things. I grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, spending my childhood on the water and making trips out to the barrier islands. I was always collecting shells and other little pieces of the Coast that I could carry home and turn into something new.
Creating comes naturally when we are young. We make things because it feels good. Then we grow up, life happens, and sometimes we lose touch with that part of ourselves.
For me, the distance from creating really began after Hurricane Katrina.
I have come to think of that period of our lives as being hit by two very different storms. One was Hurricane Katrina, which changed the landscape of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and forced us to leave my childhood home. The other was the opioid epidemic. My mom lived with chronic pain, and around that same time, she began struggling with the medications that were supposed to help her manage it.
My own life changed quickly, too. I met my husband, left school and moved away from the Gulf Coast to Oklahoma with him. We married, started a family, and before I knew it, the little girl who spent her days making things from whatever she could find along the water felt very far away.
I loved being a mother, but as the years passed, I began to feel stagnant. I missed having something that belonged to me. I missed creating, even if I didn’t quite realize yet that creating was what I was missing.
My mom seemed to know.
In 2018, she was in one of the darkest periods of her life. She was fighting battles of her own, but there was one way she had always known how to nurture me, and that was by encouraging me to create. She had done it my entire life.
So she went out and collected a bucket of oyster shells for me. She cleaned them, drilled holes in them and brought them to me because she knew I would find a way to make something from them.
Neither of us could have known what she was really giving me that day.
Now, having dealt with chronic pain of my own, I understand even more how thoughtful that gesture was. At one of the lowest points in her own life, she was still thinking about what might bring a little piece of me back to life.
That Christmas, I started making oyster shell ornaments and selling them for three or five dollars apiece. I remember how good it felt just to make something again.
By the following March, people had asked me to make oyster shell Christmas trees. I made a few, but other artists were already doing similar things. I wanted to find something that felt like my own.
So I decided to try a pumpkin.
I made one, posted it on Facebook, and people loved it. That little bit of validation was exactly what I needed to keep going.
When I sat down to make another pumpkin, I started with the top, arranging five shells together. I flipped it over and held it in my hand.
I remember the exact moment I thought, “That looks like a flower.”
Then I looked a little longer.
“That looks like a magnolia.”
What could be more fitting than a Mississippi magnolia made from Gulf Coast oyster shells?
From that moment forward, I worked relentlessly.
Oyster shell art has often fallen into the coastal craft category, and there is nothing wrong with that. But I wanted to see how far I could push the material. I wanted my pieces to stand as fine art.
For the next six years, I experimented, failed, started over and continually changed my techniques. With every magnolia, I tried to make the next one better.
Not long after I began gaining clientele, attention online, and got into 318 Art & Frame in Shreveport my mom looked at what was happening and asked me, “What have you been doing?”
In other words, where had this been all those years?
But I’m grateful for the years I spent away from creating because I know what it feels like not to have it. There is something special about finding your way back to something you loved as a child. To rediscover it as an adult, enjoy it and then build a livelihood around it is more than I ever imagined.
This year, that journey brought my work to Wine Art Gallery on Julia Street in the New Orleans Arts District. Gallery owner Brett Campbell saw something in my work and gave it a place there. For someone in the fine art world to believe in what I had spent years building is something I’ll never take for granted.
On August 5 of this year, I lost my mom.
Now, every time I sit down to work and look at the shells in front of me, I think of her. I think I always will. For the rest of my life, she will live through the work that came from that first bucket of shells.
She could not have known where that one small act would lead.
But maybe that is a mother’s intuition.
She knew I needed something of my own. She knew I needed to create.
Seven years later, I understand just how much she gave me that day.
And now, every piece of art that leaves my hands and finds a home somewhere else carries a little piece of her with it.
