THE GALLERY - THE WHIMSICAL HAND

Colour, ritual and everyday magic

There’s a sense of gentle mystery in The Whimsical Hand’s work: playful, deeply rooted in reflection, healing and ancestral knowing. Her art feels like a conversation with yourself after a long night of thinking, it's soft, reassuring, intuitive and quietly radiant.

Over dozens of pieces, from hand-painted trinket trays to sticker packs and reflective text works, she invites us to sit with joy and with grief in the same breath. These aren’t just objects, they’re the echoes of lived experience cast in colour, line and form.

Making with the body, making with the soul

For The Whimsical Hand, art isn’t something she turns on when she enters a studio, it’s continuous with her life. She works intuitively, letting how she feels in the moment shape what appears in front of her. “I’m a pretty fluid person, and my art follows that same flow,” she says. Her witchcraft, spirituality and ancestral work aren’t separate practices, they’re the soil from which her creativity grows.

Sometimes her pieces are playful, bursting with colour and a joyful, inner-child energy. These are the works that pulse with light, stickers that make you smile, trays that feel like little altars to delight and softness. Other times, her work moves into deeper emotional terrain, especially in pieces that emerged from what she describes as her “dark night of the soul.”

That duality, light and shadow, laughter and reflection, it all lives at the heart of her practice, shaping every line she draws and every surface she paints.

A community that shaped her return

The Whimsical Hand’s relationship with Geelong runs deeper than geography. She moved here about two years ago during one of the hardest periods of her life, following perinatal and post-partum depression after her second child’s birth, and the accompanying isolation and struggle that came with it. It was a time when simply getting through the day felt monumental.

In Geelong, she found not only space to breathe, but connection. She stepped into the city’s queer community, something that changed everything. What began with seeking support led her to Geelong Rainbow, where she became secretary and now a committee member. That involvement gave her access to networks of friendship, creative dialogue and mutual care that deeply influenced both her confidence and her art.

Volunteering in non-profit spaces tuned her creative intuition into something more than inward processing, it has given her roots and a renewed belief in her voice, her work and her capacity to contribute to others’ lives.

Where magic and meaning meet

Because her process is so fluid, pinpointing a “signature” project can be tough. But What the Ancestors Taught Me in the Dark, a series featured in the Vitamin C exhibition, reveals something crucial about her artistic journey. These works emerged from deep emotional processing, patterns, wounds and survival all found expression here. Yet even at their heaviest, they contain empowerment and transformation rather than despair.

View these alongside her more buoyant works, like her ceramics that shine like little suns, stickers that burst with bold colours and affirmations, and you see the foundations beneath both. Her lighter pieces are not superficial, they’re grounded in lived experience, but they dream with hope.

Across her work, text and image intertwine. Handwritten affirmations like “Softness is strength,” or “I softened, I relaxed, & that dance got easier” float almost like whispers. Figures dance, rest, reach, there is always with a sense of emerging from darkness toward light, from confusion toward clarity.

The land, the ancestors, and the everyday sacred

Her connection to place extends beyond community into Country itself. One work, I Cannot Control the Flow of Time but I Can Control My Reactions and Responses to It, was inspired by North Shore, a site she visited often during dark periods of reflection. The land there carries deep histories of grief tied to colonial violence, and she approached it with respect and care. In her interpretation, the spirits of that place teach her (and by extension her audience) about surrender, acceptance and emotional agency.

It’s a reminder that her art isn’t decorative.

Inviting you into your own inner moonlight

What does she want viewers to feel? “I want people to feel there is a light at the end of the tunnel,” she says. But more than that, she wants people to recognise their own light, the “inner moonlight” that can guide them through darkness. She sees stardust in us all: the same kind of wonder that makes the night sky shimmer.

That philosophy, and that tenderness, is about strength, and showing that joy and pain are both worthy of expression. These are very much woven through every piece she shares.

Inspiration that moves with her

Her influences are as diverse as her work: from dreamlike threads of surrealism to the rhythms of music. Songs such as Savage Daughter (Ekaterina Shelehova), Miracle (Caravan Palace), Cinderella (Remi Wolf) and I’m Like a Bird (Nelly Furtado) have sound-tracked moments of creation. Her love of surrealism isn’t about literal style, it is its ability to bend reality and emotion into a kind of visual poetry.

And then there’s the ongoing conversation with her own life, her relationships, her sexuality, her experiences of grief and joy, all feeding into a body of work that feels genuinely lived-in, not merely observed.

What’s next — from sticker packs to queer magic

Life for The Whimsical Hand is, by her own description, a game of checkers. It means balancing caring for her two neurodiverse children, volunteering, managing her home and her mental health, and all the while making space for creative growth. And yet, there’s so much ahead.

She’s working toward launching her sticker packs, expanding her trinket tray collection, and preparing for works in the upcoming exhibition Wungening & Hope. The piece she will feature, The Gathering At Faerie Pool, is rooted in Irish-Celtic myth, fae lore, and the brave trans souls who have inspired her. This work celebrates healing, softness and ancient wisdom, while also giving back with all the proceeds going to support gender-affirming care for the local queer community.

It’s a fitting next chapter, one that stitches together ancestry, identity, courage and community in a single, radiant gesture.

The art that connects us

In The Whimsical Hand’s practice, grief and joy don’t sit apart, they hold hands. Her works are invitations, invitations to rest with your complexity, invitations to trust your intuition, invitations to find light in ordinary moments. They remind us that art can be a mirror, a friend, a guide and a soft place to land.

And in a world that so often pushes us to be hard, loud and quick, her art asks something rarer: to be gentle, curious and present.

Interested in exploring The Whimsical Hand's work?

Fancy sending us some of your artwork? Just email us at geelongcereal@gmail.com. 

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