About Sage and Blue Studio
Welcome to Sage and Blue Studio. Whether you are here to support my small business or look around, I am glad we crossed paths. I built this space to celebrate the creative brilliance we all possess, and with it, our ability to cultivate joy, connection, vision, and hope. I believe that art and other creative pursuits offer templates for individual and collective change. Ultimately, I envision Sage and Blue Studio as providing inspiration, resources and space for people to step into their own power and work together to effect transformational change—using principles from art, design, and other creative endeavors as guides.
I’ve drawn on fractals to conceptualize this work—a metaphor I’ve used in my role as an education researcher. Fractals are geometric patterns magnified at different scales. They are useful metaphors because we tend to organize our thoughts and practices in culturally mediated structures. Fractals offer a model for conceptualizing, studying, transmuting, and reproducing structures. They show us that transformation can begin at the micro-level (by changing relationships, thought patterns, etc.) and magnify to scale. Similarly, visions for liberated space are useful for conceptualizing micro level changes. To that end, I see the work of Sage and Blue Studio as operating on magnified scales.
At the micro level, it is a space to create art—to hone the skills, mindsets, insights, discipline, and vision needed to produce broader transformation. Simply put, it’s a space to create and share art. With luck, along the way, my art will inspire wonder, connection, and conversation.
Sage and Blue Studio also generates research, writing, and thought pieces about the transformational possibilities of art. I have commenced this process with a book project. Additional details are forthcoming.
Finally, the Studio serves as a community space for people to create art and imagine new possibilities. This portion of the work is under development. I welcome collaborations.
To read more about the applied use of fractals, I recommend Adrienne Maree Brown’s book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and Benoit Mandelbrot’s study of Britain’s coastline.
About the Artist
It took me a long time to bring this vision to life. I’ve always created art, but other priorities took precedence. I spent my twenties piecing together work, then dedicated the next decade to a Ph.D. program and a job that was as time consuming as it was fulfilling.
All together, I spent two decades working in higher education, creating transformative teaching and learning experiences. I was blessed to work with brilliant, justice-oriented people, but after the unexpected loss of a friend and changes at work, I began asking myself what it would mean to step fully into my power. What did I want to do with the time I was given?
I am still figuring that out, but what I know is that I’d rather embrace my gifts than feed fear. That’s what brought me here. Sage and Blue Studio is a repository for the art I have created over the years, and a creative space for what’s becoming. I hope my work stirs something in people, reminds them how much beauty and possibility surrounds us.
As I sat down to write, James Wright’s poem “A Blessing” popped into my head, followed in quick succession by Audre Lorde’s “Recreation.” The narrator in Wright’s poem stops at the edge of a country road to greet a pair of gentle ponies. He tenderly captures the simplicity and beauty of the encounter and ends proclaiming, “Suddenly, I realize that if I step outside of my body I would break into blossom.” That image perfectly conjures how joy, love, and tenderness manifest in mindful moments—how transformation involves breaking open, how in love and joy there is also loneliness, sadness, the full range of human experience.
Adding resonance, Lorde’s poem, “Recreation” might be read as “recreation” (an activity) or “re-creation.” The poem lends itself to multiple interpretations: sex, the embodied act of creating, how one is in the other. The poem ends, “I love you flesh into blossom/ I made you/ and take you made into me.” I love how Lorde’s account “loves” into blossom and how both poems point toward the reflexive nature of transformation. I find myself opening, breaking, loving and transforming as I step into this newly liberated space.
Much Gratitude
Lisa Nardi, PhD
Lisa Nardi, Artist, Writer, Scholar, and Founder
The Muses, Sage and Blue
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