Meet Assemblage Artist Angela

Hello friends!

We wanted to share our artistic journeys with you in our newest blog series meet the Crow's Nest peeps written by Mike Davies.

Angela Neratini of Seaside botanicals has been a part of the Crow's Nest Artist Collective since it began 6 years ago . First as an artist selling her work and now as an employee and instructor for the last two years .

Angela was never the “artsy kid” in class.

But she sure wanted to be.

“I always knew that I wanted to make art,” she says, “and I tried a bunch of different mediums, but nothing really clicked. I wasn’t good at what you would call ‘traditional’ art. I mean, I wanted to be…I just wasn’t.”

But back when The Crow’s Nest was in its old location, she happened by one day and felt a new energy for creating.

“Just being in Nadia’s old space and helping her out there gave me the confidence to try things,” she says.

And once she found resin, she was hooked. Suddenly she realized that yes, she is, in fact, an artist.

“I think when people think about artists, they think ‘painters’ or whatever,” she says. “I always knew that I wanted to create with my hands, but I also knew that I couldn’t bring the same vision forward in the same way that other artists could.”

So she found her own way to do that: “finding cool things and putting them together with other cool things to make new cool things,” she says.

One of the things she likes the most about her particular way of making art is that each of her assemblage pieces is truly one-of-a-kind.

“What I love is the whole combination of all the things that make up the process,” she says. “I’m going out into the bush, and, yes, I’m going out there to have a nice walk, but then I’m also finding little teeny tiny mushrooms that I know would make really cool necklaces. Or I’m going out to the thrift store and seeing things that just speak to me in a different way than they would for most people. Someone else might look at that old picture frame and see it as an old picture frame, or not even notice it at all as they walk by.”

But Angela sees that old frame as “possibility.”

“It’s like I’m breathing new life into old things or making something new from things that were trash that people would just walk past or step on. I love making something cool out of something that never was.”

And she’s got a message for everyone out there who – like she used to – thinks they aren’t really an artist.

“You can express yourself in so many different ways,” she says. “It doesn’t need to be ‘traditional’ to be of value artistically. If there’s a creative force behind it, it’s art, and don’t let anyone, even yourself, tell you otherwise.”

Check out her art here