I have always loved vintage cameo jewelry. There is something about the tiny portraits of women tucked inside those oval frames that feels almost magical. They are beautiful and delicate, women frozen in time with their hair pulled back and their faces turned just so. But the longer I looked at them, the more I started to wonder about the women inside. They seemed so picturesque, but also a little sad. There was something about being preserved inside that little frame that began to feel less like being honored and more like being trapped.
I wanted to set them free.
That was the beginning of Uncaged, a collection of six feminine archetype paintings about freedom, the expectations we carry as women, and what happens when we decide to become the person we actually are rather than the person we have been told to be.
The Archetype of the Uncaged Woman
There are plenty of definitions of what a woman is supposed to be. Society has told us to be small, quiet, submissive, beautiful, and young, but our individual cages can look completely different. Maybe you were expected to be the good girl, the caretaker, the successful one, the mother, the responsible one, the one who never makes anyone uncomfortable. Maybe your family had a very specific idea of what your life should look like. Maybe you learned early that being loved meant being easy to love.
I think we all have our own version of this.
To me, breaking free isn't about rejecting every expectation or becoming some perfectly independent woman who needs no one. It is much simpler and much harder than that. It is choosing a life that feels true to you. It is being willing to ask whether the life you are living is actually yours, or whether you are still trying to fulfill a role someone else handed you.
Each woman in Uncaged became an archetype of that freedom. Some of them represent the beautiful, expansive parts of freedom. Others hold the uncomfortable pieces. Because freedom doesn't actually feel like one thing. It can be joyful and uncertain, confident and terrifying, playful and deeply wise all at the same time.
You might see yourself in one of these women, or you might see yourself in all of them. That is part of what I love about archetypes. They don't tell us who we are. They give us a language for noticing the parts of ourselves that are already there.
When a Cameo Becomes a Window
The women in Uncaged are painted in the traditional cameo portrait style that first inspired the collection. I wanted to honor the beauty of that tradition while also asking what might happen if the women inside those frames were allowed to move.
So the natural elements in each painting begin to escape the edges of the cameo. Flowers, leaves, and branches don't respect the boundary of the portrait. They grow beyond it, turning the frame into something less like a prison and more like a window.
Nature shows the way out.
This is something I come back to again and again in my art. Nature is not just something beautiful to paint. It is one of my greatest teachers. I think of nature as a form of wisdom, a bridge back to something we have always known but can easily forget when our lives become too separated from the natural world.
This is also part of what I mean when I talk about the Cosmic Christ or Nature-Wisdom. I believe there is a consciousness woven through everything, that we are deeply connected to one another and to the natural world, and that spirituality doesn't always need to happen inside the places we have traditionally been told to look for it.
Folktales have always understood this. The tree knows something. The river carries a message. The animal appears at the exact moment the hero needs direction. Nature is often the thing that shows us the way forward.
So in Uncaged, nature becomes part of the story. The plants breaking through the cameo are a little map. They are showing the women that the edges they thought were permanent might not be permanent at all.
Maybe there is a way out.
The Divine Masculine Knows How to Move
Every woman in Uncaged holds a spirit bird, and there was something very intentional about the birds I chose. They are all the male variety of their species, the ones with the extraordinary colors, elaborate feathers, and almost ridiculous beauty that we tend to associate with femininity.
I love that contradiction.
Women have spent so much time being told that beauty is part of our value. We are taught to care about how we look, how young we look, whether we are attractive enough, feminine enough, put together enough. And then you look at the animal kingdom and suddenly the males are the ones wearing the extravagant feathers.
The peacock doesn't apologize for taking up space.
The quetzal doesn't try to tone down its colors.
The male cardinal doesn't need permission to be beautiful.
This became part of my understanding of the Divine Masculine.
I don't mean the toxic masculine, the part that holds us down, traps us, makes us small, or is threatened by our strength. The Divine Masculine is something different. It is the part of us that allows us to move forward. It takes action. It has direction. It says, go.
And it isn't threatened by the Divine Feminine. It sees her as a partner.
I believe all of us, male, female, and non-binary, carry both masculine and feminine qualities within ourselves. The Divine versions of both allow us to become healthier, fuller versions of ourselves because we need both the yin and the yang. We need the ability to receive and the ability to act. We need intuition and movement. We need softness and strength.
The women in these paintings are not waiting for a man to save them.
They are holding the part of themselves that knows how to fly.
Explore the Uncaged collection →
Freedom Doesn't Feel Like Just One Thing
When I began this collection, I didn't set out to paint six particular emotions. I was drawn to different women and different images, and as the paintings began to take shape, I started to see a pattern.
Freedom has an entire emotional landscape.
We tend to imagine freedom as joy. And of course it can be joyful. There is wonder in discovering who you are when you aren't trying to be who someone else expects you to be. There is confidence in realizing that you can make your own decisions. There is grace in knowing that you don't have to walk the path alone.
But freedom can also be uncertain.
It can be frightening to step away from something familiar, even when that familiar thing was keeping you small. The woman who has spent her entire life following a map someone else drew may not immediately know where to go when she finally puts the map down.
There is wisdom in that uncertainty too.
The six women in Uncaged became a collection of guides, each showing a different part of the journey.
Wisdom: The Crone and the Mandarin Duck
My goal in life is to become a wise woman, so Wisdom and the Crone sit very close together in my mind.
I wanted her in this collection because women of a certain age are so often left out of our modern stories and teachings. We celebrate youth endlessly, but the woman who has lived long enough to know something about grief, change, love, loss, motherhood, failure, beginning again, and becoming herself is often the woman we stop looking at.
Which is strange, because she might have the most to teach us.
I also wanted to emphasize the beauty that comes with age. This painting is actually my favorite in the entire collection. There is something about her face that feels deeply alive to me, not despite the years but because of them.
The Mandarin duck beside her is sturdy and firm, a beautiful presence that feels like a companion rather than a rescuer. The Divine Masculine doesn't need to take her place. He simply stands beside her.
There is something powerful about becoming the woman who knows.
Joy: The Quetzal
Joy is the painting that feels the most immediately alive to me. The woman is surrounded by tropical color, and the quetzal's long tail gives the painting this almost otherworldly quality. I chose the bird because its colors belonged with her, but also because there is something soulful and dainty about the quetzal that felt right for this particular woman of color.
Joy is one of the emotions we expect to find on the other side of freedom, but I don't think joy needs to be earned by having everything figured out. Sometimes it is simply the feeling of being fully present in your own life.
The colors are loud. The bird is beautiful. She is allowed to take it all in.
Uncertainty: The Peacock
I love that the peacock takes up so much space in this painting.
The woman holding him is uncertain and still seems to want to hide a little, while the bird is doing exactly the opposite. He is displaying every beautiful feather he has.
That feels like freedom to me too.
We don't always know what we are doing when we first step outside the expectations that have shaped us. Sometimes we leave the cage before we know where we're going.
Uncertainty isn't proof that you've made the wrong choice. Sometimes it is simply what happens when you finally make a choice that belongs to you.
Grace: The Cardinal
The cardinal has always carried a spiritual presence for me. There is a common association between cardinals and loved ones who have passed, and I loved the idea that this woman might be holding a guide who came to her from somewhere beyond what she can see.
Maybe it is a mother.
Maybe a grandmother.
Maybe someone she never got to meet.
Maybe it is simply the part of herself that already knows the answer.
I think we sometimes imagine freedom means doing everything alone, but I don't believe that. We need one another. We need the wisdom of the people who came before us. We need community and mentors and stories and the quiet reminders that we are not the first person to walk this road.
Sometimes the guide we are looking for looks different than we expected.
Wonder: The Chickadee
The chickadee has been my favorite bird since I was a child, so there was no question that one of them would find its way into this collection.
There is something extra playful about a chickadee. It feels curious and mischievous, like the little bird might know something you don't.
Wonder is one of the things I think we can lose when we become too focused on getting life right. We stop noticing things. We decide we already know what something means. We stop looking closely.
But wonder asks us to look again.
It asks us to leave a little room for mystery.
And maybe that is part of freedom too. To not have every answer. To allow yourself to be surprised by your own life.
Confidence: The Hummingbird
The hummingbird is tiny, fierce, quick, and strong. Its beak almost looks like a little sword, but it is also incredibly delicate and beautiful.
That balance of strength and beauty made it the perfect companion for Confidence.
Confidence can come before freedom, or it can grow because of freedom. But to choose a life that feels true to you, there has to be at least a tiny seed of confidence already inside you. Some part of you has to believe that your voice matters enough to listen to.
You don't have to feel completely confident before you leave.
You just need enough to take the first step.
Explore the Uncaged collection →
You Don't Have to Choose Just One
The more I think about these women, the less interested I am in asking which one you are.
Because I think you are all of them.
There are days when I feel like the Crone, wanting to gather wisdom and understand what actually matters. There are days when I feel like the girl with the chickadee, curious about everything and easily distracted by something beautiful. There are days when confidence comes easily, and other days when uncertainty feels like the loudest voice in the room.
That's the thing about archetypes. They are not boxes we climb into. They are mirrors.
You might recognize yourself in one today and another five years from now.
That is why I believe meaningful art can be more than decoration. A painting can become a mirror for a part of yourself you haven't had language for yet. It can be a reminder on your wall that you are allowed to feel what you are feeling. It can become a guide.
This is a big part of what I mean when I talk about art as medicine. I don't mean that a painting will fix you. I mean that sitting with an image, a color, a story, or an archetype can open a door inside of you. Sometimes the thing we need to see has been there all along, waiting for the right image to help us recognize it.
The Women in the Frame
Uncaged was originally created for a garden exhibition in August of 2023, which feels fitting now that I think about it. Nature was literally surrounding these paintings as they were first released, and the whole collection was created around the idea of finding a way out through nature, story, and our own inner knowing.
That weekend also happened to be the weekend my husband and I found out we were pregnant.
I didn't know then how much my own life was about to change.
Maybe that is what I love most about making art. Sometimes we create something before we understand why we needed to make it.
The paintings know something before we do.
Looking back at Uncaged now, I see a collection about becoming. About the strange space between the person you have been and the person you are becoming. About the courage it takes to step outside of a role, and the humility it takes to admit that you don't always know what comes next.
I see women who are not waiting to be rescued.
I see women who are learning to listen to themselves.
I see women being guided by something larger than themselves and discovering that the guide they were searching for might have been inside them all along.
And maybe that is what it means to be uncaged.
Not to become some perfect, fearless version of yourself, but to make enough room inside your own life to hear the voice that has been there all along.
The voice that says you are allowed to be here.
You are allowed to change.
You are allowed to be beautiful and powerful.
You are allowed to be uncertain.
You are allowed to grow older.
You are allowed to want something different.
You are allowed to take up space.
You are allowed to fly.
The cage was never the whole story.
There was always a window.
Explore the Uncaged Collection
Wisdom · Joy · Uncertainty · Grace · Wonder · Confidence
Explore the Uncaged collection →
If you want to sit with the deeper idea behind art as a guide and companion, you can also read my Art is Medicine guide, where I explore how we can use the art we live with to create reflection, connection, and a deeper relationship with ourselves. Download it free. when you subscribe to my newsletter.