Artist Cammie Blaisdell 

For a while now I have been interested in mythology and nature as inspiration for my work. I remember sitting in my apartment my senior year of university, trying to think of a theme for my senior art show, while in my lap laid Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I knew I wanted to put those stories into my art somehow, because those stories, handed down through the ages, are particularly appealing as they always seem to contain something humanity once knew, but has now forgotten. Myths are visually visceral, always strange, and always inviting the imagination to leap up and out over the known horizon.

After university I lived in the American southwest for a number of years and aside from the landscape, which is breath-taking in any season, I was surrounded by cultures that were intimate with ancient, nature-based mythologies and who celebrated the relationship between life and death in festivals like Dia De Los Muertos. This solidified my interest and passion in anything skull or bone related. Skulls never scared me. Instead, I saw beauty in the lines and symmetry, stories in the cracks and patina on bone. I peeked past the differences in different skulls and found the similarities in them all, no matter if it was cat, dog, human, snake, bear. Those shared elements between our animal cousins and us connect us to the environment and to our shared home.

After I moved to New Zealand I was able to travel more and experience more than the humdrum of a 9 to 5. Getting older, going inward, and immersing myself in other cultures besides the one I grew up in, I noticed change seemed so natural to almost everything around me, except for people. I feel like there is so much grasping and clawing to avoid change, avoid discomfort, avoid little deaths that mean growth, that I can’t help but turn my inward and outward ear again to our forgotten myths and sip at the wisdom they contain. Themes of change, transformation, endings, and new beginnings continue to show up in my artwork. Through my art I like to remind myself that life is not static or boring or even comfortable, but instead full of movement and mystery - it is full to the brim of more things we don’t know than do. My art is one way that I not only get to flex my creative muscles, but also to explore the unknown. Infinite potential is always at my fingertips and that is never more apparent than when faced with a blank canvas or lump of clay.