We recently connected with Miriam Zimms and have shared our conversation below.
Miriam, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
BOOM – Waking up from a major surgery where I had to relearn how to walk again over a two-year period gave me no choice but to pursue a new life as an artist. I had been a successful business and management consultant in the environmental field for over 22 years when my life changed. I had to have the primary bone cancer removed from my left pelvis and it, along with my hip ball and femur to get “good margins”, had to all be rebuilt too. My pelvis and leg would be salvaged and I’d have an internal imputation. But my left leg would only serve as a “scaffolding” to hold me up. Three months after the surgery, my psoas atrophied. I was left with a disability. I could no longer walk long distances, run, jump, ski (on water or on snow), dive, dance, and even wear high-heels. But I was alive and wanted to stay alive. I would relearn how to walk again and I would need to muster up all the courage and mental strength to find my new abilities. My new ability became my arts in health life, over time through my own personal daily arts in wellness practice, I became an artist, a teaching artist using wellness arts, and an advocate for the Art of Survival as an artist with a disability.
Miriam, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
After a very successful career as a national environmental consultant, I came to art twelve years ago through the Arts in Medicine (AIM) studio at Moffitt Cancer Center. After a significant surgery and using the studio and establishing a daily healing-arts practice, my body and life changed. As an Emerging and “Outsider” Artist who did not come through the traditional route, my arts practice helps me focus away from pain, anxiety, and other issues I never experienced before. From that daily abstract drawing art practice, I have exhibited my art in galleries and art festivals in my local community and Florida. This definitely sets me a part from most artists due to my visual art focusing on body loss. I’ve had three surgeries that amputated or “took” something from my body, my breasts (breast cancer), my ovaries (ovarian previvor), and my left pelvis (chondrosarcoma cancer). And my art expresses in every line stroke with my art pen, through every brush stroke of color those significant losses as a woman. It’s healing for me. I am also now a teaching artist in the community for the meditative and therapeutic arts. I’m a part of the growing trend of a long held, but not so well known, industry called Arts in for Health. In the corporate world these types of classes would be categorized as team-building or wellness classes. In a local community, these art classes are known as the wellness arts. When I teach art, I explain that I was a business person turned abstract artist through a health crisis, with no formal training. And that the artist creative is inside each and every one of us. We just need the open-safe space to create without judgement or a prescription. En Casa with Miriam is about creatives feeling at home, that anything is possible one step and stroke at a time, and that there are no mistakes in art, just like life, they are opportunities. For all these reasons, I am known for advocating for the “Power of Art to Heal.”
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?
Art, that word alone drives fear in so many non-creatives. But I believe we are all creative and bring artistic qualities into so many things in our life. Here are just a few examples – the color or style of our hair, the makeup we wear, the clothes we wear, the jewelry we chose to put on, the shoes we wear, the food we cook, how we present food on a table, the way we set a table, the color and make of the car we drive, the way we decorate our home, and the list goes on and on. The word – artist – has often made non-creatives feel inferior to someone with a degree, but this is no longer the case. Abstract therapeutic art requires “No Experience.” All it asks of the art apprentice is to be open to being in a safe place to create something and to explore, express and have fun. What often happens when someone is given a safe or open space to create without judgement is magic. I witness this with every class I teach. I even see this with seasoned artists who take my class, because they don’t feel the prescriptive pressure to create. I experienced it myself. I am convinced my left brain shut down and my right brain was allowed to explore freely and create art, abstract art, with no pressure, no stigma. And others began to tell me how amazing my art was. I didn’t believe it, but when I got asked to have a gallery show of my art where the art would stay in the gallery for one full year, I was shocked into the reality that maybe…I am an artist.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
What’s always driven me is to to pursue a path to bring good into the world through focusing on my area of impact. For me, my experience is that success follows because it’s not my goal. It’s a by-product of the good and giving back through my own shared experience. As an environmental consultant the first 22 years of my career, my goal was to develop and implement program plans in local governments and businesses for protecting the planet. When my body and life changed, and that wasn’t possible in the manner I once knew it; the ARTS came to me. It found me. It chose to set up inside of me. And there is a metaphor in that it came that way. My mission ever since then has been to spread the power of art to heal in so many ways. Art is also the Arts, so I believe that art has the power to heal because it comes in many forms. The visual arts being the most thought of when we say Art. But there is so much more – sound and music, movement and dance; poetry and writing; drama and theatre; spoken word and storytelling. As an Intermodal Expressive Arts Practitioner I believe that using more than one form of the Arts in a class takes students on a therapeutic journey of self-awareness and healing. The Zentangle Art that I also facilitate allows for entering a meditative state through five strokes creating patterns that makes me fully present and enter, what is often called, “yoga for the mind” art. Wellness Arts is hear to stay, heal and allow both the artist, creatives and non-creatives to explore the Arts without prescription. Everyone is an artist and I want to make the arts accessible to all.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://encasawithm.com/
- Instagram: @HipsterCZT
- Facebook: En Casa with Miriam
- Twitter: En Casa with Miriam
- Youtube: https://encasawithm.com/youtube
- Other: Email: [email protected] My Blog is on my website.
Image Credits
Miriam Zimms