Pixie Makes Creative Chaos
"We Make Things", episode 2
Note: This article goes over the email length limit, to experience the interview in full please view it via Substack.
Welcome to “We Make Things”, an interview series where I interview people about the things that they make. This week, we are interviewing pixiewithpens aka the account behind Creative Chaos Goblin Club and co-collaborator of MoodMilk.
I loved getting to interview Pixie because we didn’t just talk about their incredible projects coming up, we got into in depth discussions on mental health, productivity, and how to maintain a realistic art practice in a modern world. They are an incredible example of a modern art practitioner, and hearing from them was so, so inspiring. Interviewing them was easy and fun, like sitting on the couch with a a friend and having a chat.
Enjoy!
How would you describe yourself using one food item and one drink item?
hot cocoa and a poké bowl. a hot coké bowl, if you will. hot cocoa has childhood comfort and sweetness and whimsy. a poké bowl is a dish i love, and it has a lot of different flavours and textures which i think represents my creative chaos.
The concept of a hot coké bowl just made me spit out my coffee. I think that is most def creative chaos in a bowl. I love your symbolism behind the choice but I am also now all consumed with imagining this dish in real life. Would a hot coké bowl be a soup or a chunky drink?
oh my god. i was just playing with the words like they’re little dolls, i didn’t think this far into it. but it has to be a soup because i find chunky drinks revolting.
Do you consider yourself a maker? What things do you like to make?
i usually think of myself as a creative, but maker also rings true! it’s the same thing. i like to make poems and collages and weird drawings and colourful paintings and poetry zines and blog posts on my substack. i’ve also experimented with making knitted things (socks and hats), crochet things (little critters), embroidery things, clay things (pins, magnets, earrings), and zines of my art.
You describe yourself as a “Creative Chaos Goblin” and even host the “Creative Chaos Goblin Club”. Can you tell me more about what it means to be a Creative Chaos Goblin?
when you become a member of the creative chaos goblin club, you’re saying YES to all the parts of you that are messy, and “too much”, and weird, and cringe. you start playing by your own rules and stop shaming yourself for not fitting the image of “perfect artist” that you’ve internalised. proudly claiming the label chaos goblin is a way of saying: i’m valid as a creative right now, in the mess, in the multitudes, with dirty dishes in the sink and five different projects on the go. for me, it has meant giving myself permission to be myself. it’s been extremely affirming and joyful. and i’m just getting started!
i started formulating my art philosophy this past summer, and when my poetry friend ryan stephen thornton wrote about his similar ‘maxims of modern poetry’, i realised that it’s bigger than me. it’s an art movement! ryan and i are also co-conspiring on a chaos goblin-y substack litmag called MoodMilk (despite neither of us enjoying milk that much lol).
i’d sum up the most important tenets of the chaos goblin art movement as: follow your joy, make emotionally honest work, fuck the algorithm and its trends, embrace your multitudes and your weirdness. this world needs more heart, not more hot takes.
“This world needs more art not more hot takes” is such a powerful sentence to me. I find that ESPECIALLY on Substack (a platform that is for art, but also commentary, but also news, but also many other things) it’s so hard to not get swept up in whatever the “hot take” is at the moment. I am very guilty of getting caught up in said hot takes.
How do you balance being a creative online, curating community in that space, and trying to ignore the algorithm and the hot takes of the moment?
very carefully! lmao. no but seriously: i imperfectly make it up as i go along, and if i occasionally get swept up in the hot take debate of the day, i forgive myself. we are only human and we love to know other humans and to yap. when it comes to staying with your purpose, i think it’s helpful to have a clear idea of what said purpose is, and have it be something so natural to you that you rarely need reminding of it. additionally, something like writing my chaos goblin art manifesto definitely helps me! it solidified in my brain that i am on a mission, you know? and affirmed to myself what i value in life, which is creating, and what i value in creating, which is fun. honestly i think once you have that compass for yourself, ignoring the algorithm is barely an effort, because you’re on your own path.
What does it mean for creativity to come from chaos?
so, from life? haha. i think it means breaking the illusion of needing to have four uninterrupted hours in an art studio with high ceilings, or a weekend alone in a cabin with a typewriter, or whatever your fantasy is, in order to create. we have to make art while the laundry machine is running and the garbage truck is making noise outside. otherwise it won’t get made! and that would be a tragedy. i weep to think of all the art we have lost to perfectionism (aka fear of failure). perfection was never even an option!!! the options are make it imperfectly or don’t make it at all. so please make your art!
^possibly the most chaos goblin image of me that exists: making a big garish painting to kill the priest in my head that told me i was having “too much fun” painting colourful cats during my 100 day project last year, expert chaos goblin narya in my arms, and the mischievous look on my face. and if you look through the doors in the background you can just make out my unmade bed.
I feel like I want to write down all of your responses and keep them in my sketchbook. “...in order to create. we have to make art while the laundry machine is running and the garbage truck is making noise outside.” is such a beautiful sentiment to how art is made in the real world, and if we spend our lives waiting for the perfect fantasy of what we imagine artmaking should look like, we will never be creative.
I think a lot of new artists, or artists who are transitioning from a studio environment (see: graduating art school) can have a really long time with getting the idealism of art out of their heads. As new artists, you imagine your artistic journey to go one way and it inevitably does not do that because art is creativity and fun but also the practice of taking what’s in your brain and making it real (aka a skill that needs practice), and artists leaving art school are transitioning from that high-ceiling’d studio environment where you could paint all day to one where you are suddenly making art in a little apartment, probably outside of the artistic community you had before.
Apparently I have a lot of thoughts on this lmfao. I just love the concept of being an artistic goblin because it’s a way of saying “fuck it, I’m going to make art anyway even if it’s different than what my own perception of art making is” and I think that’s a very brave thing to do and encourage in others.
YES. YOU GET IT. thank you! “fuck it” (tone indicator: liberating) is an extremely accurate description of the creative chaos goblin ethos.
In a fun kind of contrast to the “chaos”, you have recently discussed New Years Hibernations and the importance of rest in creative work. Can you speak to how art often fluctuates between the chaos and the demand for rest?
everything living in nature expands and contracts, right. a flower expands from a seed to a bud to a bloom, and then shrinks down as it wilts until it reunites with the soil. we breathe in and out, our hearts get bigger and smaller as they pump blood to keep us alive. art is a part of life and works in the same way. when you have exhaled, like finished a big creative project, you need to inhale, like taking a break, consume the art of others, have new life experiences. or in terms of chaos: the sparkling festival of creative madness would be impossible if there was never a break from it, a moment of restorative stillness. it’s the unity of opposites, to use the philosophical term. the light would not exist without darkness.
In the age of posting art on the internet, artists are encouraged to share their vulnerabilities and hope that they are well received. Going with rest, what techniques and rituals do you use to balance the emotional work of sharing ourselves and our art with the world?
journaling. i do a lot of it. when it comes to this vulnerability sharing, the most important thing i do in my journal is validate any fear or worry i have around it. these feelings make a lot of sense! but i’ve previously just pushed through and gritted my teeth, and often berated myself for having those feelings. turns out that being kind to myself yields better results and is less draining! i know, i was shocked too.
the journal is also a tool to feel into where i have hard limits around sharing. being online, surrounded by other people’s takes constantly, can lead to a situation where our own wisdom and intuition is drowned out by the noise. sitting in silence with pen and paper is helpful to excavate the answers and solutions i may already have in me.
i also seek support from other artists i’m in community with, which is truly invaluable to me.
You are working on an upcoming poetry book project that has just been sent to beta readers. I am thrilled for you and this project, so I want to give you a space to talk about this book in the interview. What can you share with us about the project?
YES! i’m so excited. last year when i started putting poems into one big document for a future collection, i joked that my poetry collection would have 69 poems, because i have the humour of a 12 year old boy. well, i couldn’t let that meme go, and the collection will indeed have 69 poems. (nice.)
it covers quite a range of topics, but when i sorted them through i realised that the most important divide in my mind was between a more descriptive tone, and a hopeful/defiant one. the hopeful are in the majority by 10 or so poems. i’d describe the collection as a refusal to be defined by my trauma or the horrors of the world, an honest look at hard things that then turns the gaze upward and onward, a stubborn celebration of life despite its suckage. it also has a fair bit of playfulness and whimsy, because it’s me and i like to entertain myself when i make things.
the goal is to release it on my birthday, april 14! so i can tell people to buy it as a birthday gift to me lmao.
below are two of the poems that will be in the collection! their backgrounds are two of my experiments in abstract art, something new i started exploring in the past few months.
I can’t wait to purchase a copy of your book! What have you learned in the process of curating and printing this collection? Will it be available as e-book, printed, or both?
eee thank you! it’s most important to me to get the printed version out into the world, the e-book could potentially arrive slightly after the april 14 date depending on how i manage the timeline. short answer: yes both!
You work across multiple mediums and practices. What does being a multimodal artist/maker mean to you?
that i’m never bored! lol. seriously though, it means that every art form is more rich, because they all cross-pollinate and fertilise each other. it’s like having a garden with a diverse ecosystem. it gives me options when i have the creative itch but maybe not the cognitive energy to draw or get paints out—i can then draft a poem in my notes app instead, or put some scraps into my junk journal.
^me wearing many hats as a multimodal maker + self-employed lol. (t-shirt and hats are available at pixiewithpens dot com btw!)
Never being bored is so real, I think that’s why I prefer multimodal making.
What do you use to help inspire you when you’re feeling uninspired?
these days it’s more common for me to be overwhelmed by too much inspiration, lol. but learning about the world or studying art history never fails to inspire me even more!
When you speak about art and goblins and monsters, you make art feel folkloric and magical. Do you see art and making as a type of magic?
yes. we spend a lot of our time in our rational, intellectual brain, just living through time (or against it, as it often feels). when we make things with our hands, we can enter that flow state where we’re unaware of time passing. that feels magical to me. it’s also really cool in that flow state when we’re no longer led by that rational, self-conscious brain, and the process leads us instead. i think what happens there is that our subconscious and emotions take the lead, but it feels like magic.
If time and money were not a concern, what is a dream project that you would like to work on?
i would love to host creative travel retreats! an artist i love watching on youtube, sophie mcpike, hosted a trip to ireland where she guided people in travel sketchbooking, and that was so inspiring to me. (also i really wanna go to ireland.) in my version, every other day would be a rest day to accommodate my disabilities and chronic illness, and we would do poetry writing in the field as well. i imagine telling people to touch the leaves and the bark if they want to put a tree in their poem, things like that. maybe i’d challenge people to find a drawing/writing utensil in nature and see what we can create using a stick with some mud on it or something. or another exercise, with actual art supplies this time: we’d go to a rocky beach and everyone picks out a favourite rock, then paint a beautiful portrait of it. yes it has to be beautiful. flattering rock portraits only!
my other dream is to make books, but i am making that happen!!! the poetry collection is just the first on the docket. next up is a book based on carefully selected fragments from my diaries (2003-2024). i’ve made five of the chapters for it so far! it’s taking a long time because i refuse to stop doing other projects alongside it. i started the diary book when generative AI started exploding, which caused me to ask myself what would be the most human thing i could make, and the most me. naturally i landed in the diary material. what’s more human than the cringe parade that is vomiting your feelings onto paper?
^a drawing from the autism chapter of the diary book! every chapter has a different art style, because of course that’s how a chaos goblin artist sustains momentum on a huge long-term project. (yes i also have ADHD.)
anyway, so i am making the book dream happen, but if money were not a concern i’d hire someone to help me with the formatting and layout. and marketing! i’d wanna write my own copy, but i could get support with that, and pay for ads and stuff to get the word out. i’d also get cleaning help to free up my precious energy for more art and shenanigans.
Okay first of all, I am now dying to go on that Ireland trip. It sounds so inspiring! I want to go find a very beautiful rock to make flattering rock portraits what the heck.
I love how your book has become a response to a world becoming progressively more dominated by artificial intelligence. Embracing the most human parts of ourselves without embarrassment is resistance against machine dependency. Creativity calls against AI! AI can not and will not ever be creative.
Thank you for spending your time with me! Is there anything else you would like to say to finish up this interview?
thank you for inviting me and asking such delightful questions!!! this was a joy. i’m happy to have come across you on this wild wasteland we call the internet.
i will leave you with this reminder. life is short, have all the fun you can!
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Other Episodes of “We Make Things”:
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thank you again!!! this was such a fun conversation, and being prompted to think about these things helped me as well!
and the soup v drink question was brave and visionary.
great interview you guys. i cannot wait to pick up pixie’s poetry book when it comes out :)