bellywater's Profile

Bio

i live in indianapolis with my husband josh. we work from home together, & have the pleasure of partnering together in our work & ministry. he is a musician & pastor, & i make things with thread & paint & old photographs, help him run the music business, & make lots of coffee dates & food & tea for lots of people. we travel together, & then i am “merch girl”. i love our life together. i am not really an indiana girl, though. part of my heart is still in the jungle, where i grew up, & where i worked for several years, after college, in sustainable development. & so it is still a passion. that is why i talk about it so much. making art & crafts is an attempt to intersect these two worlds. one day i would love to work again with artisans, women, & their handcrafts, to use art/craft as an instrument of sustainability & healing.

the origins of “bellywater”:
bellywater press began in the winter of 2003 as the work of four friends. we were currently living in anderson & muncie, indiana, & all had a common dream of a small independent press where the pursuit of beauty, truth and “perhaps quirky, takes on the walk of faith [could] be explored and reproduced, either in traditional book form, or in more one-of-a-kind, handmade artists’ books”. we have since moved to separate places, even coasts, & have discovered that the kind of handcrafted books & works we loved to make together were communal in nature, quite difficult to continue while living in different places. so the press part of bellywater is merely sleeping for a season. the name & spirit continue through each of us, as we continue on in separate handmade projects, until we meet again... the name of bellywater comes from john 7:37 and 38, which reads... “jesus stood & cried, ‘if any man thirsts, let him come and drink. he that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water...’”

www.bellywater.typepad.com

Female, Born on October 30

Favorite Materials

felt, corduroy, thread, twine, cotton