Shedding Layers

Upcoming Gallery Show in March

Hello All,

I hope you all have been making it through okay— or ideally better than okay! I hope you all are stupendous!

I have started daydreaming about mud. These past few days, bird songs have branched out into balmy 45 degree weather— reminding me that we have cleared the time of darkness and hibernation, and now again have turned towards light with the incoming spring.

The ground where I have been standing has once again shifted, but that is because it is muddy, and I keep walking in it. I change my perspective from surprise at things changing— to remembering that most change is unexpected, and I have been making a lot of changes on purpose in my life. I rejoice in being able to make so many decisions. What a privilege it is to decide.

My upcoming gallery show— which will be up for the months of March and April at the Amherst Town Hall Gallery— is not about mud, but it is about change and it is about decisions.

SHEDDING LAYERS is about what happens when you (I) at some point look around yourself (myself) and you (I) realize you (I) don’t like where/who you are, and you would like to be somewhere else, and or some other version of yourself, but that you have a journey of a lot of change ahead of yourself before you arrive there as your Self. You realize you have to shed a lot of layers, because you have hidden what is vital quite deep within.

It feels like taking off coat after coat after coat. It’s kind like that scene in Shrek where Donkey and Shrek are talking about onions. It feels like unraveling. Like becoming undone. Like falling apart— feels like just about everything your world was made of prior, crumbling as you try to hold onto it. Through the seemingly endless destruction, something sparkles, and you follow that.

It is a strange sensation… trying to save an old world because it is familiar and in some way comfortable, while also trying to destroy said old world in order to save yourself because it has become suffocating (to say the least). All the while trying to build another world that is safe(r) for yourself, safe(r) for others too, for all of us.

Shedding layers is about finding more layers. Always more layers.

GALLERY RECEPTION will be Friday March 7th at 6pm at the Amherst Town Hall Gallery, see you there!!! Address: 4 Boltwood Avenue, Amherst, MA (Parking behind building or by meter on street).

I appreciate y’all

<3 Elayna Sturm

(they/them)

elaynasturm.com