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

Alright, Meredith thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

Earning a full-time living is something I still navigate! Just because something falls into place at one point in your career doesn’t mean it will last forever. Allow yourself to sink into the needs of community, with yourself, and with the work asking to be made and let the modalities surprise you. Don’t let ego convince you that the work can’t be made in new iterations!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hi there, My name is Meredith White. I’m a nonbinary Artist, Writer, and Energetic Practitioner. I’ve been making art my entire life, while I focused on mural and painting work pre-covid. Not until 2020 did I dig into my writing and spiritual practice to bring as offerings back out into the world for others. I dug into tarot, Reiki, mediumship, death doula work, and have just gotten my Ancestral DNA back so as to better learn about the specific practices of my ancestors in the English Channel. This allows me to pick back up energetic and somatic work for the body that is better linked to my specific bloodline and less so of some of the appropriative practices of new age spirituality.

I created the brand Root Inward last summer as an extension outside of myself. I create products for the body, the home, and for daily practice. These items allow us to strengthen our relationship with self, with queerness, with intentionality, and with slowness. These items are meant to be worn, used, loved, burned, shared, and as aids in comfort and safety. I am a Tarot Reader and have just signed on with a dear friend Damaris Bybee to extend my work with spirit in their brand new studio in the Goat Farm.

The connection between art and spirit allow my practice to feel much more whole. I was so worried what others would think about the very private, very personal practice that was my spirituality and now I just can’t wait to share it with my clients. This work is an extension of my queerness, of my relationship with the land, an aid in world-building, a means for us to find ourselves amongst late stage capitalism that exploits the hell out of us. This work is so much bigger than me, and I am merely a channel for it to move through. I feel so lucky and fortunate to be facilitating this practice with community.

You may find me through my website: www.rootinwardstudio.com and through the brand’s social @rootinwardstudio. Tarot, the online shop, and potential collaborations can all be accessed through these spaces. If you’d like to find my personal work with my yard, my dog, the bees, quilting, herbalism, and anything my body feels like touching that day you may follow me @meredithannewhite. Thank you so much for being here!

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

This is such a valuable question. As a creative, my practice shifts constantly. People primarily knew me as a painter, a designer, a muralist. I fit into appropriate containers, and at one time, it felt like enough. As the world crumbled around me in 2020 due to a global pandemic, national protests for BLM, and my relationship to queerness, I changed. My entire identity changed. My truth systems were shattered as everything I was raised to be, everything I was told was fact, everything that I was promised was created to protect me, was an illusion.

I started quilting, I started beekeeping, I started working with my grandma who had recently passed. I pulled cards every day. I dug into meditation. I found my dog and walked multiple times a day. The big, public, ego-driven work of past faded away and small, intimate creations were being birthed. The quilts brought softness and slowness. The beekeeping brought connection to land and ancestral knowledge. My dog brought patience and access to nature I had never seen. The tarot and my energetic work broke me open to my intuition and my body’s connection to facilitation.

I lost connection to people, to previous clients. The spaces I used to exist within no longer felt resonant when I became sober. I had to rebuild myself, community, my relationship to work and art and living from the inside out. I watched people around me expecting a version of myself and my work that didn’t exist anymore. I struggled deeply with it.

I offer all of this to say that just because you may identify as one kind of artist does not mean you’re limited to that craft. You can pick up whatever you want at any given time. We’re allowed to shift and grow and grow out of something so that something new and unexpected may be birthed. I used to care so much on how I was perceived and I’m current;y sinking into the space of, “so what?’

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My work, my life, orients around world-building alternatives to practice, to art-making, to sustainable living and creation. We are told to produce, to quickly sell, to be palatable. I call bullshit. My work lends itself to pushing me to the edge over and over and over again. The art, the products, are an extension of me and spirit that allow the message to be received and worn daily. The hands-on tarot and energetic work facilitates this on a much deeper, much more intimate way. I’m so honored and surprised and grateful.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.rootinwardstudio.com
• Instagram: @rootinwardstudio / @meredithannewhite
• Facebook: Www.facebook.com/rootinwardstudio
• Other: https://meredithannewhite.substack.com/

Image Credits
1. Photograph taken by me of my sister, Mallory White with my niece June, wearing the Boundaries Protect My Spirit tee, all styled by me 2. Photograph taken by me of fellow beekeepers during a hive maintenance check for my bee club Tara Beekeeper’s 3. Hand-painted tea towel that doubles as a banner that reads “What does resistance mean to you?” 4. Hand-poured protection candle entitled “Soft Strength” made with My Turn Row candles 5. Reading tarot on a quilt in the studio photographed by Frances Grinnan 6. “Come Home to Yourself” mural as part of Forward Warrior in Cabbagetown 7. Hand-made stool crafted for the “Lost and Found” Show at ABV Gallery 8. “Home is Body” illustration made for a collaboration tee at Loquat Shop in Portland, Maine for sale right now