We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Xavier Allen. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Xavier below.

Xavier, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My parents are both artists and forces in the world. They have a bold energy and thrive on novelty. They are skeptical towards conventional ways of dealing with problems, preferring to figure their own way. It’s been invaluable to have that kind of example. You are going to run into so many problems, no matter what the project, and you need to draw on some inner belief that at the end of the day, if you keep going you have what you need to figure it out. Even if you mess up, it’s not a big deal, it can always be fixed!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My art is purely abstract and open to all interpretations, though I often reference the energy that surrounds the body, like a protective field. That energy might have an edge, something like an ego, that slices through the world, navigating it. Maybe it has softness on another side to balance it, maybe not, depending on the person. The surface is material driven, mimicking colors, and textures found in nature, but the shapes themselves are fluid and sort of otherworldly.

The process of creating is one of the few times I feel connected—to the present, to myself, to the piece. I feel abundant, the time is enough because it expands to the space I give it. There are moments of absolute contentment, and tenderness, this happens often enough to feel intentional. I hope that the work goes on to affect the spaces they inhabit in a similar way, creating a break from ‘the day to day’ and opening up a more expansive sense of time.

I took the scenic route to art. The initial plan was to go into medicine, but not long after I somehow found myself working in fashion. Through my line I met people involved in the art world, specifically art consulting. It’s an intensely creative, though quite logistical side of art and design, though the limits of that creativity lead me to pursue my own practice. I sculpt and create after hours, on weekends, basically any free moment.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

Once you open that door, it doesn’t seem to stop at art. Creativity invites synchronicity into your life, sometimes small and sometimes not so small. It helps to have discipline about your emotions and thoughts because they can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Somatic work has been transformative for me, and has inspired a desire to create more installation art. Experiences that you can interact with involving form, sound, touch, and presence—to feel connected to oneself, to the art, to each other.

A few resources of significance.
a movie: Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a surrealistic, multi-dimensional experience. A movie very much in line with the idea that whatever work we are pursuing, we are really pursuing ourselves.

a person: Jeremy Irons, graceful, unpredictable, detached, a joker of sorts, perhaps unintentionally, that’s where the mystery lies.

and a book: The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. Physics has always been an interest of mine, it’s a science that opens up the world. The theory of one dimension containing all parts of the whole is an idea I’m continuing to explore in my work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://xavierallen.studio
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/xavierallen.studio/