Right now my life is at this really choice part where I have my balance of teaching and
working with kids and then also being a maker and making my own art.
And a lot of the kids that I work with have that same desire to work because I know what
it's like when you're working in your studio and you go into this state of flow.
You're just forgetting, you just forget where you are, you forget everything and you're
just completely absorbed in your work and it's so satisfying in this really amazing
way and I see that when the fly kids, when they're working, they'll come in and look
at all the supplies and they already can't hear me, can't see me and then they start
to work and they're super absorbed in what they're doing and then make something and
then they're like come out of that trance like oh and I so identify with that and I
love giving kids their first taste of that.
I think the fly week, I'm giving that to kids also, this amazing like falling away
of everything else and just being totally absorbed in your work because that's something
that they can do at home and a lot of the fly kids have workspaces in their houses now
and that they, the projects they work on, they bring home and keep working on much because
I'm much to the sugar in them.
I love, like sometimes the parents will email me pictures of the thing in the house still
and I love that.
I always wanted to be a professional artist only or working in the art field and I always
thought education is the side thing.
People were always like no, that's your thing, you're really good at working with kids and
you're really good at teaching and I think I'm finally making peace with that because
I quit teaching so many times and I just keep coming back to it.
I would teach like seven classes in a day, each 45 minutes just like back to back, lunch
back to back and so you'd have these really amazing, efficient projects.
I would have these efficient systems of greeting everyone and welcoming them and telling them
what to do and then someone would start to like make something really cool.
Maybe it was a bad time, like it was time for them to go or like they're getting something
out that like oh if you get that out then they're going to want it so you can't have
it.
I was just always having to shut people down from some awesome thing that they were making
and just like at night I would get home and I'd be like uh like that is the opposite.
So from taking a step out away from teaching and then looking at it with fresh eyes I realized
that if I started something like fly then that I could create that for kids in an alternative
way.
There's all these benchmarks and ways of documenting what is success in a child and
that it really is about limiting, limiting, limiting how they express themselves and then
when they're an adult trying to like open that up and like think outside the box after
like forcing them into this little box for 12 years.
Even though fly is an art center it's more about getting kids to think creatively and
to see themselves as people who can enact change and see themselves as people who can
take these same things.
We're all looking at the same things and you have to put it together in a new way.
The ironic thing is that it's like so much easier at the same time like it's way easier
for me to not have to totally think through a project like step by step and help communicate
it to them and then make them replicate the thing that I have in my head and then get
someone excited about it like we're going to make this thing and I'm just like how
to do it and like you have to follow my directions.
It's hard to get kids excited about that because it's boring for them.
That's the one thing that kids always say to me they're like I thought you were going
to tell me what to do and that was awesome that you didn't tell me what to do.
