(gentle music) - Roaming Hills is a traveling art studio.

So I bring the workshops to you.

What I do is all of the research, the gathering of materials, the setup, the cleanup.

What I do is I'll take my artistic processes and the skills that I've gained, and break them down into something accessible.

My main goal is to demystify the process so that others can explore and elaborate on the skills that they gain from my workshops.

I provide the experience and the making while the host is there to enjoy that time and create with their friends, community members, new people, at any different venue, all across the 417 area.

Right now we offer workshops monthly at Finley Farms.

So I'm there at the workshop every month.

We host a variety of workshops there.

You can register online.

Workshops are guided by the season, so I will craft the workshops around what the land has to offer.

For example, in the summer, we have an abundance of native flowers.

So we are taking the flowers and making eco prints with the pounding, the leaf pounding, or the steam pressing, all of that.

And the late summer, we'll do cyanotype prints with the flora from around the area where we'll make sun prints.

It's actually kind of a shadow print.

When the weather pushes us indoors, we will do hand stitching, sashiko, embroidery, all sorts of different methods and techniques to repair or mend clothes that maybe are getting a little worn so that you can extend the life of those clothes.

Also, plein air painting is something that I love to do in the late fall and the spring.

You can get out, and that's just direct observation from what you're seeing.

You translate that in the two dimension without a reference.

It's a beautiful way to capture a moment without having to refer back to a past moment.

Right now in the spring, we're doing macrame plant hangers.

Everyone's getting their plants out, they're starting seeds, whatever it is that they're doing with their plants.

So we will make macrame plant hangers.

And the beauty of macrame is that it's easily accessible.

It's attainable to everyone.

You don't need any special materials.

There's no equipment, there's no, not a high cost is involved.

All you need really is cord and scissors.

So when you're creating macrame, you're using knots that you use on a daily basis.

The overhand knot, the cow hitch knots, all of these are knots that people are familiar with.

They just didn't know they had a name.

It's just a really cool process that is easily attainable to most all people.

It's this one on top.

A lot of my students will come into class and even to the workshops thinking, "I could never do this.

This is amazing.

It's incredible."

And once the process and the techniques are broken down, they realize that art truly is something that anyone with patience and effort can do.

Just like really anything in life, if you try long enough and hard enough, you're probably going to make it work.

And it's the same with art.

Out to dry to rest.

So.

The most rewarding part for me is watching the energy transform, not only within them, but in the room in general.

There's this creative meditation that you enter.

And when you get there, the Buddhist call it no mind.

And no mind is kind of like when you're in that flow and all the outside distractions, all of the negative thoughts, all of the positive thoughts, just all of the thoughts kind of go away, and you're just in that meditative state.

So watching my students on a daily basis enter that, you know, their tongues will start sticking out or they'll just kind of have wide eyes.

Watching that happen for adults is incredible because we don't have that space very often.

It's not something that we are taught to find, and it's something that's hard to find as a space where you can just, for lack of a better word, zone out and have your own thoughts without any other outside thoughts.

And I find that for me, that's why I feel like I pursue art so much is so that I can get into that meditative state of just creating.

The Ozarks inspire me.

The hills, the woods, the plants, all of it inspires me.

I live in a town with a river that runs through it, which is something that's incredible that not everybody has.

And I try to take time to always be outside.

When I was a child, my grandmother and I used to walk through the woods all the time, these long walks.

And it was, in fact, in those walks where my grandmother taught me how to see.

She taught me how to look at the world and how to encounter it in a way where I'm part of it.

And to be present in your surroundings can be so inspiring.

A lot of times we are just so distracted by our own thoughts, and by what we're supposed to be doing, and where we're supposed to be, and what should we be thinking that we forget to look.

(lighthearted music) I've always been a maker.

I don't remember a moment in my life where I wasn't, as my grandpa would say, piddling.

You know, I was making a mess somewhere.

I was always into something.

If there was something to cut or to make, I was going to find it.

My grandmother and I spent a lot of time together when I was a child, and she was always humoring, always facilitating any artistic endeavor that I wanted to do.

She would make it happen.

So having a makerspace is non-negotiable for me.

I have a beautiful studio now, but it doesn't matter where I'm at, because wherever I am, I'm going to be making something.