Artists Adventure — Emilie Parker

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My life has been a long, spiraling journey of transformation—an adventure shaped by resilience, loss, curiosity, and the healing power of art. I began life with birth defects and five surgeries before the age of twelve and the early loss of my brother at age 11 to a heart defect. By fourteen, I had also lost my grandmother who helped raise me, and by twenty-four, my father. Each loss etched depth into my soul and awakened a lifelong search for meaning, beauty, and connection.

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It took me 13 years to complete an MS in graphic design because I couldn’t stop taking art classes. I worked because I was raising my two little girls mostly on my own. Along the way, I built a career as a health educator and project manager, supporting my family through decades of dedication and creativity. Finally getting an MS degree in business.  My five marriages—to scientists, mathematicians, and artists—reflect my lifelong fascination with both logic and imagination, the tangible and the transcendent.

 

Today, at seventy-four, I am living my dream as a full-time artist, sculptor, and teacher. My studio is a place of healing, community, and joy—a space where clay becomes a language for the spirit. Each sculpture I create carries the energy of transformation: the alchemy of grief into gratitude, form into flow, and discipline into freedom. Through my art, I celebrate the sacred rhythm of life—its cycles of breaking and remaking, its wild intelligence, and its power to reconnect us with the creative pulse that lives in all things.

 

I am profoundly grateful for this season of life, surrounded by family, students, friends, art and my husband of over 20 years — Douglass, and the quiet blessings that arrive every day through the work of my hands.