“Stay here long enough…
Stay here long enough to revive your hope, to drop your terminal cool, to give up defensive half-truths, to creep, carve, bash your way through.
Stay here long enough to see what is right for you.
Stay here long enough to become strong.
Try the try that will make it.
Stay here long enough to make the finish line — it matters not how long it takes, or in what style.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés
I’ve begun a new visual and story-based series inspired by Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves — beginning with the myth of The Red Shoes.
It’s a story about soul famine. About the beautiful things we trade our creative lives for. About what happens when we forget we are wild — and what it takes to remember.
This tale, and the traps it names, mirrors my own story in profound and painful ways. So I began to paint. One piece became another. The series is still unfolding.
Over the coming posts, I’ll be walking through the archetypal Traps Estés outlines in The Red Shoes, paired with paintings (finished and in-progress), memories, and mythic reflection.
I’m not writing from the wound, but from the wisdom that followed. These paintings — and the words that accompany them — are offered in the hope that other women might see their own truth reflected too.
The hunger is gone. The shoes are off.
What remains is the long return — and the art that rises from it.
She Who Remembers
36x36", acrylic and mixed media on canvas, Heather Hanson, Artist
Part of the Red Shoes series from Women Who Run With the Wolves, this piece explores the silencing of feminine creativity under patriarchal forces.
A young girl bearing the presence of a raven stands as the keeper of memory, watching over a ghostlike feminine figure embedded in the woods, and a man with an ax representing the cultural severance of artistic expression.
The layered symbolism and shadow forms ask the viewer to consider what has been cut away — and who is left to remember.