I'm Addison Kanoelani, and I've tried to quit art more times than I can count (money's tight, life gets in the way, I run out of space to work in). Doesn't matter. I always end up back at it. At this point I've stopped fighting it.

I used to sneak onto my roof at night as a teenager in Reno. Not to escape anything…but to search. The stars were barely visible through the city haze, but I'd lie back anyway and search.

That's still what I'm doing every time I paint. I grew up hearing I was too much: too sensitive, too emotional, too intense, I cry too much, pick one. I now know those feelings stemmed from undiagnosed Autism and ADHD. Nature and the stars never once asked me to be smaller, so that's where I went when I didn't feel like I fit. I never felt like I had to ask for validation from nature, or when I looked up at the night sky, I felt like I belonged there. My work is me trying to hold onto that same feeling and hand a piece of it to someone else.

I'm Hawaiian through my family, born in Reno, and I've lived in Southern California, Phoenix, and now Southern Utah, where I've settled with my husband. I build different sizes of mixed media pieces. Some of my favorite materials are preserved flowers, flowers I make out of clay, fiber optic lighting, resin, crystals, it’s honestly limitless.

I work out of my dining room, which gave up being a dining room a long time ago; it's mostly tropical plants, crystals, and canvases now, presided over by three cats: one blind senior who's claimed every warm surface in the house, and two ex-feral kittens who have not, in any sense, chill.

I have a BFA and was nominated Gallery Chair Director for the Red Cliff Gallery by the Southern Utah Art Guild. But mostly, I just keep making the same thing over and over, in different forms: creating the world that nature and the night sky made me feel, where me and my too much-ness, belong.