Why I had to stop resin…
I was ridiculously passionate about botanical resin….. totally OBSESSED!!!
I would dream about it, work till past midnight every night, and cover every spare work bench with my experiments.
In the beginning, working with this medium was like making my dreams real. Suspending real-life colour and texture in clear resin as if it is magic. Also, the more people denied that it could be done (and everyone was), the more I wanted to prove them wrong… and I did.
I started selling commissions and owning my business, increasing my prices to enable me to keep up with the demand. I ran sell-out class, after class, teaching and inspiring lots of people. I created hundreds of commissions and worked with some of Perth’s best florists and wedding planners… and then, I burnt myself out.
Undiagnosed neurodivergent people pleaser burns out….shocker I know.
Turns out that no matter how much I trialed and tested and convinced myself that making art pieces that were essentially wonderous, frozen-in-time pools of awesome, I could no longer justify the toll it took on me, my mind and the planet.
I had built a six-figure business with all the parts working amazingly supporting my family with a respectable business but behind the scenes I was struggling with crippling anxiety and depression. What I used to love was becoming harder for me to do because the pressure to please people was simply too much.
The final death knell was Covid 19. All my weddings got cancelled and money dried up. My mental health and ability to cope with life became unsustainable after the bushfires in December 2019, the fear of COVID on a global stage, the lockdowns and the rallies for Black Lives Matter. I spiralled into a pit and by the end of 2020 I had an ADHD diagnosis.
It took a further 2 years to put the Autism pieces together too.
So have written this blog post over and over in my head but I haven’t felt brave enough to put it out until now.
I loved my work so much and I am glad I made it but I am also very reluctant to work with it in the future, especially if it means that it is putting money in my pocket by creating rubbish for the planet.
Here are my ten reasons I gave up resin.
Cost of purchasing resin - The more you buy the less it costs. But this means that to price my work as low as possible I would have to dish out around $800 per order. Considering I never wanted to run a big business the demand to always have this amount of money in reserve was a constant worry.
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Cure time and layering- um ADHD. Creating an artwork that needs 10 layers and 12 hours per layer to cure ….nope.
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Risk factors - It doesn’t matter how careful you are, resin is finicky. As an intuitive artist I am most comfortable responding to a medium or idea. Resin on the other hand demands planning and a clinical approach to ensure the best results. Risk factors are many and not only caused me to spend additional time correcting mistakes but also cost money and caused stress…. a lot of stress.
for example
foreign objects(hairs, dirt, fibers) can take days to remove and almost always leave scars.
flowers can sometimes fade without any explanation
potentially burning plants due to the heat created when the resin is curing.
weather affecting the cure (humidity, high temps, low temps)
not to mention health risks for your lungs and skin
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Cost of sale compared to art of the same size - OK Math…sorry not sorry
Ok so similar amount of cost…ish but look at the difference in the number of hours spent actually being creative, which as an artist is honestly the whole point.
5. Perfection is the destroyer of creativity - Perfectionism in and of itself is anxiety-inducing. The desire/need to make everything perfectly for every wedding client and never make a mistake because you only have one set of flowers that you will never be able to replace is nightmare-giving. Perfectionism is unhealthy and unnatural and very much in opposition to my true nature. The days where we would say this as a good thing are long gone. Perfectionism is an anxiety-giving, trauma response, not a positive personality trait. But, this was the pressure I was placing on myself every day and I burnt myself out.
If you aim to only ever create perfect work, be sure you are a designer, not an artist.
6. Quantity to get quality - Art is about expression, exploration, and play. To make good art, you need to be willing to/allow yourself to make lots of it. To learn, you need to be willing to make crappy stuff you don’t love and be ok moving on. This is why you never buy top-quality art materials or equipment until you feel comfortable with them. Otherwise, you will either never use them or feel so anxious to make the right, best thing that you won’t enjoy the process.
Resin has so many risks, costs, and demands that it is a creativity killer. Try make lots of it to play and it will inevitably end up in the bin and not only cost your wallet but the earth. There is no recycling it or fixing it, only trashing it, and I wasn’t willing to do that.
7. Monotising your work - Resin has very few income options. There is the work, teaching people to make the work and . . . nope that’s it.
Each piece is only ever that. I tried prints and homewares but they just don’t have the same appeal.
The lack of monetisation options forces the price up for each piece even more and then it becomes even harder to sell. This is why I have boxes full of unsold resin artwork scattered around my home.
Whereas 2D artwork can be licensed and reprinted. You can have it on stickers and cups and shirts and every other surface possible. It can be painted on walls and buildings, in books on websites and more and more.
8. Comfort - When working with resin you have to wear PPE(personal protective equipment) and there are so many sensory issues there for me. The heat, the smell, the sweat, the bruises, and the discomfort of the mismatched glasses, head phones and mask together for noise,sight and respiratory protection was all quite exhausting for this overly sensitive artist.
I would often decide not to wear my PPE as I couldn’t handle the sensory input, meaning I would get resin on my clothes and fingers and head spins from the fumes.
Self care is important All.
9. Longevity - If I am putting so much effort into something that has to be perfect the first time, demands that I am putting myself in uncomfortable, high sensory input situations and I have to charge as much as I have to then I want to be damn sure it lasts forever. But no, each time I would get feedback from a customer(which felt more often than it actually was) about how they were unhappy about the colours or the finish or the changes or the design not being as they wanted, I would be so ashamed. Yet I was literally doing everything I could possibly do to ensure I made high quality artwork. I simply couldn’t control the outcome and it was too much for me.
As an artist and an autist, this sort of feedback would send me into a shame spiral that would not leave me for weeks.
10. The environment - Transport, creation, permanence.
I have touched on all of these already but this was actually the final straw and something I simply couldn’t get past. The knowledge of how large of a toll resin takes on our planet was just unacceptable.
Each bottle of resin I bought was created with fossil fuels before being shipped across Australia via truck. The fumes created by it curing went into the atmosphere and added to CO2 levels.
The moulds, gloves, paper towels and excess resin from every pour and every artwork needed to be thrown away meaning I created a bin bag of rubbish every week from my studio. As my whole household only creates a single bag of rubbish each week, this wasn’t ok.
Further to this each time I taught people how to use this medium for fun I felt so guilty about the potential that I was encouraging more people to create pollution.
I know I am just one person and that maybe I am not making that big an impact, but I care too much about that impact to knowing continue to work with a medium that is so obviously bad for it.
I Loved resin and the pieces that I have bring me lots of joy. But these reasons stop me from making more.
Do you use resin?
How do you feel about this argument for why resin was not sustainable for me?