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

Alright, Sierra thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

I started really creating when I was at my lowest, I was teaching, dealing with fertility issues, and it was after the pandemic. I’ve always had low self-esteem but I needed something physical that I could create and put care into in order to feel some catharsis. Art is something that seemed like it was for other people, I am an avid museum visitor and am currently working on my master’s in Museum Studies so the comparison is something I had to deal with and move on from. I think seeing my favorite artists use their medium to work through traumas and doubt helped me realize that I didn’t have to make something perfect for it to have gravitas. I think most of us grow up thinking about how we could be more of some quality, or if we just could do this one thing it would make us be recognized or happy, creating art humbled those voices and let me accept where I was in the moment. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to take a chance and make some truly hideous art until I found myself.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I have a degree in Ancient Studies and was teaching Social Studies for six years. I had mentioned before that I was at a low point in my life so when the holidays were coming up I decided to try to make gifts for everyone with a mindset of knowing it would probably look bad but that’s the brand right now. I started with resin, which is a ridiculously hard medium to experiment with in hindsight. I created coasters and earrings as gifts and found that I loved the experimentation of creating, the first iterations were terrible but I got better. I decided to make earring collections of goddesses, inspired by mythology, literature, and my archaeological background. I’m proud of my earrings, they’re pretty, but more importantly, the people that buy them want to channel those deities and tap into something powerful within them. The idea that I was making people feel empowered when I, myself, was feeling at my most powerless was pure therapy. I make a variety of things now, home goods, metaphysical tools, and jewelry with resin. I also carve my own linocuts and make prints with them, again goddess inspired. I try to use historical data, natural ingredients, and my intentions to create something meaningful for every person who visits me.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Not every work is a winner, art is so subjective. Some works that I am not proud of are the ones that resound with a certain audience and others that I thought would make an impact go unnoticed for a long time. I think because my art is so personal to me I take it very personally when it flops in front of an audience but that’s not fair to me or them. So if you have to unlearn something, it is that although art is an extension of ourselves it does not mean that approval has to reflect on you. I remember that I made these altar clothes that I dyed with natural materials and then stamped with my artwork and people were not biting, it killed me because I put so much effort into learning how to make natural dyes and polled what kind of designs people would want to see. I started hiding them on my table for markets, if someone happened to notice them then I would explain but I was too afraid of them being rejected and by extension me as well. I had a friend who also does markets explain that she loved them and that I should display them to give them a chance at reaching a larger audience and that the market we were currently at was not our target audience. It took so much of the pressure off of me and made me love them again.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I always talk about my mental health on my platform, so being resilient in the face of so much self-doubt is what makes me powerful. Sometimes resilience is eating a meal, making an entire earring collection in a day, or even hyping myself before I walk into a market. There have been times when I haven’t had it at all in me to create or even plan something new, especially when I’ve had a few low markets where things were not being noticed. As someone with ADHD, sometimes I have to trick myself into making, I tell myself, “Why not?” and that pushes me to create something for fun. Anyone that follows me on social media knows that I do polls constantly looking for inspiration, my followers may not know, but they are the ones that frequently get me out of a slump. There have been markets where I have gotten overstimulated and started to shut down, the benefit of having my mental illnesses for so long is that I can usually trick myself out of the hole by walking around or leaning on a friend nearby. My depression makes me doubt myself, my anxiety makes me terrified, and my ADHD leaves me uninspired and overstimulated but finding my people and creating through it is what gets me to the next stage. It isn’t a battle that I can just get over, it is a war and some battles are harder than others, but I’m going to keep getting up because it is worth it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.etsy.com/shop/druidandwraith
• Instagram: @druid_and_wraith
• Other: [email protected] TikTok: @druid_and_wraith