To me, I'm always still that little girl barefoot in the foothills of Appalachia.

I'm not originally from the city, so I really love incorporating nature into my work.

But most of my inspiration comes from the same love as my mom.

Literature, poems, anything from Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Roman myths and reducing it down to something that's recognizable but with a little bit of magic is something I find really beautiful.

I'm Heather Keely, I own Heather Keely art.

I am owner and printmaker.

Printmaking is very intense.

So I'll start with a story that I want to tell.

Like I said, and reduce it to an idea and usually pick flora or fauna and I'll make the original sketch.

And then I have to reverse it, because when you carve it onto a block, everything you print is inverse like a stamp.

So it may take me anywhere from two days to three and a half months to carve a block, and then I could spend anywhere from one day to a week running all the prints individually.

I started doing watercolors and pen and inks, but I would end up with one original and a bunch of digital prints.

So when I found printmaking, it was I could make all these beautiful, detailed works and end up hand making every single one.

And there was something so beautiful about it that I ran with it and sort of taught myself.

Being fully capable of being an artist takes a lot of audacity.

My mom knew I wanted to be an artist when I was four years old, and stuffed my stocking with art supplies until the year I graduated.

But my counselor told me it wasn't really an option, when you tell them you want to do art.

And that's really disheartening to hear.

So you try out so many things.

But a familiar pigment, whether it be ink or paint or charcoal, just ends up in your nail beds time and time again and you realize this is not work for me in the way that a dredging work job is.

It's work that I have to do, and trying to do it today and online can be has has its own complications.

Like I said, you do it because you have to.

And you just know people are going to see it.

Because art has always been around and it always will be around.

It is a great encapsulation of, you know, the human soul to the outer world in a permanent way to document what it's like in our society today.

I hope they can realize that there's still a lot of magic in the mundane things, and take time to slow down.

The process itself takes a lot of time for me to slow down.

It has definitely taught me patience, but we consume a lot of content in ratio to what we're creating, and I think I really just want people to realize that there's still a lot to see out there.