Why Ephemera?

A Love Letter to Old Letters, Soft Edges & the Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

There’s something about old paper that feels a bit like sunshine for my soul - it just feels GOOD. The other week I found myself holding the most beautiful vintage letters from the 1950s - soft envelopes worn down with time, lovely looping handwriting, little pauses and crossings-out. You know - the kind of thing that instantly makes you stop, breathe, and feel.

And as I opened them (gently, like a secret door into someone else’s mind), something inside me clicked. I felt connected - not just to the writer or the receiver, but to this bigger, timeless web of people trying to make sense of themselves and one another.

Ephemera truly holds magic like that.

It felt like these letters had been waiting for me. Waiting for my questions about connection, identity, the feminine… the themes I seem to orbit again and again in my art. And suddenly, here they were - an invitation to explore all of it more deeply.

Edges, Becoming & the Soft Places Between Us

There’s a passage in Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted that has been living rent-free in my mind (and honestly, I can’t recommend the book enough - I am devouring it with an embarrassing level of enthusiasm!):

“[Edges] are an unending state of becoming, and we are like them: we ebb and we flow; we soften sometimes, merge into the ecosystems of others, then retreat into the safety of our own sharply defined boundaries.

We are gentle, and warm, and then we are storm.”

Yes.
Exactly that.

I feel myself ebb and flow constantly. The boundaries of the self… they’re slippery, aren’t they? Sometimes I merge with others far too easily. Sometimes I vanish into their ecosystems entirely. And right now, I’m running - lovingly but fiercely - back into my own centre. Nesting there. Protecting, nourishing, reclaiming.

Turning inward.
Turning homeward.

And maybe that’s why working with ephemera feels so right. Old letters are full of edges - both literal and metaphorical. Edges softened by time, by hands, by the act of being held and opened and read. Edges that mark where one story ends and another begins.

Why Old Letters? Why Ephemera?

Because they speak of connection before they say a single word.

There is something unbelievably magic about vintage letters. The tactility. The intimacy. The way a person’s handwriting is basically a fingerprint of their inner world.

Drawing on them feels like a celebration of the tiny, ordinary moments that carry the deepest emotional weight - the “secret intensity” of everyday life.

Not grand gestures.
Not drama.
Just the quiet, steady heartbeat of being human.

And really, what better canvas to explore stories of self, connection, longing, becoming?