hello.chelsart

Earlier this year, a teacher I had never met sent me an email.

She told me that her class of three-year-olds had been collecting gum nuts from their playground, bringing in banksia pods from home, and asking big questions about nature. To extend their curiosity, she went looking for

Australian artists who paint seedpods, and somehow, she found me.🥺

She told me one child looked up from her work and said, "I'm doing like Chelsea."

I was deep in recovery from surgery when that email arrived.... so I read it four times.

I painted a Crow's Ash seedpod and posted it to Melbourne. The children named their whole inquiry "The 100 Languages of Children." They painted their own seedpods. They arranged them into a circle, but I saw a loose heart.

This is what art is for, not the galleries or the accolades.

Just this...

Little hands holding something they found on the ground, seeing it differently, making it their own.

Thank you to Eva and the beautiful humans of Junior School for letting me be a small part of your world... YOU are all real artists.

Seedpods are hiding in plain sight, waiting patiently and excitedly for someone just like you to find them.❤️

This is not my usual art post.

It’s still about seedpods.
But it’s also about my hysterectomy.

Sometimes the art mirrors life more closely than we realise.

If a chapter in your life is closing for you right now, this might resonate.

Read the full story on the blog:

https://www.hellochels.art/post/seedpods-scars-and-starting-again-what-my-hysterectomy-taught-me-about-transformation