Feel Something, Make Something

Intro

In which I tell you a bit about what making things means to me


I spend my days documenting the sky, my body, and the thoughts filling my head. Half-finished poems litter my notes app in strange configurations that often don t make sense . . . until suddenly they do. I don t question how the wisp of a cloud sends me running to the rooftop balcony, or why I must draw the way fear eats away at my belly. Sometimes it takes months or years for patterns to emerge between all my practices. A trail of clues; secrets not yet revealed. An intimate collaboration between me and the universe.

I hope these pages spark your very own practice of listening and responding to the surges of desire and oceans of emotion within you.

Here we embark on the magnificent sequence, old as time herself: Feel something, make something. Rinse and repeat.

This book is about release: releasing your tangled thoughts and tenderest emotions through the act of art making. It s about letting it all out onto paper so you can make sense of your feelings from some distance. It s the alchemy of transmuting emotion into artifacts. This work allows you to hold the inexplicable in your hands, run your fingers across the spine of longing, crumple grief in your fist, or pin your rage to the wall so you can step back, take a breath, and examine the contents of your heart and mind from a fresh point of view.

When I create from my feelings, the enigmatic becomes manifest; mark-making reverberates like an echo delineating the edges of my consciousness, a mirror reflecting the inconceivable. Something transcendent happens when we allow the swirling, fearsome tangle to tumble out onto paper, canvas, or clay or into poetry, song, or dance.

This process this aching, messy, broken, perfect process of scribbling thought and feeling onto paper is the work. It s everyday magic. And it s available to us at a moment s notice. 

So where do we begin? The hardest part for me is

Caitlin Metz is an artist and educator who works across mediums to visually communicate a sense of belonging and make the world feel a little less lonely. The co-author of My Body, My Home: A Radical Guide to Resilience and Belonging, Caitlin uses art as a means of processing feelings and disrupting systems of power with tenderness and empathy.