Help Aubrey pay bills after CATASTROPHIC illnesses

Why help me? My story is long, in fact a lot longer than I could write here, but the important truths are that I have suffered as huge of a disaster over the last 2 years to compare to losing my physical art studio, equipment, and two careers as if any environmental disaster had hit me.

Please help save a starving artist! I have tried desperately to stave off homelessness, but I am close and if that happens I will lose my tiny studio and equipment for good, leaving me unable to claw my way back to my art career, which is also the best mental and physical therapy I have ever found, I will have to give my cats up which I couldn’t bear to lose my children, and my future looks incredibly bleak.

But with your help I can survive until I am fit enough to make enough artwork to make a living, even if it is in poverty, and eventually hopefully disability benefits that will allow me to breath with relief that while it isn’t much per month, I at least will be able to cover basic necessities when I may not be able to work for days or weeks in the future with my rare genetic disorders and won’t get to this point ever again. I just want to live day to day without the fear of homelessness or being unable to care for my cats…

my story

In the last 2 years I have broken 6 major bones on two separate occasions. In May 2023 I dislocated my left hip, tearing a labral muscle in the hip joint causing serious pain and disability, forcing me to miss (& not get refunds for) workshops I had registered for and had to cancel most of the workshops I was going to teach. All activities I had planned for making money as an artist that year came to a grinding halt, including starting my online shop and my virtual teaching business. 

Then it got worse, I was having such a difficult time walking and was on high dose steroids for over 2 years and I broke my femur and got trapped on my bedroom floor in such a bad position that I gave myself myositis (bruising/inflammation of the muscles that is very bad) and had to call and have EMS break into my house because I couldn’t get to the door. I had to have emergency surgery on my femur and was hospitalized for over 6 weeks doing an insane amount of inpatient physical and occupational therapy. Despite progressing well with therapy, my femur did not show much sign of healing until more than 9 months after breaking, the fracture caused a large amount of new bone (size of a baseball) to grow up above my hip, causing a lot of chronic pain & my legs are no longer the same length, which causes pain in my hips and SI joint. My surgeon and I decided because the surgery would require cutting not just through a lot of muscle but removing some, that I am not currently healthy enough to go through that surgical recovery, especially as the bone may grow back.

I also was given COVID by one of the hospital staff towards the end of my hospitalization and it has made me basically bedbound for over a year. My COVID infection almost killed me by causing severe pulmonary embolisms (clots in the lungs) and two strokes in my white matter. I was on oxygen therapy for over 4 months- in hospital and transitional care unit again, then spent the spring and summer (when I wasn’t back in the hospital for Parkinsonism’s syndrome) stuck in a long stay hotel room as I weaned myself slowly off oxygen because I was still using my walker all the time and was not strong enough or capable to move back into my house with all its stairs until September 1st. The hotels really were awful but still very expensive, as insurance would not cover a place for me to live while I was too disabled to use stairs. I have been in my mom’s house (she now lives in a 55+ apartment after having a terrifying fall down the front stairs, where she fractured the lobes of her brain in addition to other brain bleeds, and was in a wheelchair for 3 months recovering from her severe brain injury as well as a broken foot- my mom and I relied on each other to take care of each other when we had bad health days/weeks/months but we ended up in the hospital for months at the same time) since September 1st, while we prepare to sell the house in a few months as my mom can never live here again.

 I’ve had consistent back pain during this time and an MRI showed that I have a compressive fracture at L1 in my lumbar spine, this showed up right after I was discharged for my hip fracture so it is extremely unlikely that my spinal fracture happened independently of my hip fracture (which I didn’t even fall to break those, they just broke spontaneously). I developed significant lymphedema, so literally holes opened up in my legs to let fluid out of my body. Thankfully those have healed but I still have lymphedema for unknown reasons. I had been juried into a very expensive 4 weekend Christmas market in November/December 2023 that I was too sick, weak, painful, and didn’t have enough stock to sell because of everything going on for the previous 9 months which I was counting on the proceeds of this market to help me move to France (which is now up in the air). I have high autoimmune markers including one for rheumatoid arthritis and my RA flares are getting worse and more frequent.

I’m deeply in debt since I’ve had no income for over 1.5 years at this point (I had a lot of emergency savings & even went through my Roth IRA and now have nothing while I wait 270 days for an answer to my most recent reapplication for SSDI). Many more things happened health wise in just the last 6-9 months, please check out my updates for more details.

I am just now able to start making short forays into my basement studio and am clawing my way back to making sculptures and sculptural paintings. I hope to finish my first teapot ever (it is really a sculptural idea of a teapot, but will be functional) by January 1, 2025 to submit it in an art exhibition. The next 6 months, with a lot of continued physical therapy and occupational therapy and epidurals and other procedures I am determined to be strong enough to make artwork at least 15-20 hours a week, maybe more if my body will just stop going wrong (and if my Long Covid and severe chronic fatigue and insomnia improve).

By summer my goal is 40 hour work weeks including weekend art fairs to sell my work.

I would appreciate any help you can give to help me survive these next few months! I need to bridge the gap between now, with no income and lots of credit card debt, to then when I can support myself and also have disability benefits weekly as a under poverty level cushion (but still better than no cushion at all!). If you can’t donate yourself, please spread the word- donating to nonprofits is something I hugely support, as someone who worked for and founded nonprofits, but donating directly to and supporting a literally starving artist is one of the best ways you can directly make a difference in someone’s life- you can see me fighting for my life and future today and every day and will be part of my success story when I make it through to the other side! I’ve been told repeatedly the past 3 years that I need to write my memoirs, and if I can get them published I will be sure to mention everyone who donated or shared this GoFundMe in the acknowledgements!

Want to support me but can’t make a donation? I am open (lightly) for commissions! Let me know what kind of glass casting, glass fusing, pâte de verre, porcelain sculpture, textured sculptural painting, tiles or tile mural, vase or planter, or porcelain pottery you want and we can figure it out! Win-win for both of us!

Thank you so much!

If you participated in my studio shower in 2021, I will be announcing the reception (& hopefully goodbye party for moving) shortly & you’ll get your token of appreciation- if you donated or gave me a gift with that please don’t donate again, I am already very grateful- if possible please just share. If you have been meaning to participate in my studio shower now is your chance! Besides the GoFundMe some friends/family/supporters have preferred to give me gift Visa cards, I will happily accept anything I can use to pay bills, buy food, pay down my credit cards etc!

Art, especially sculpture and pottery, are an incredibly huge part of how I improve my mental health. Becoming a full time professional artist in 2020 after seeing my chronic disability kill my previous beloved career as a wildlife veterinarian and epidemiologist and professor saved me from the depression that being unable to continue a career I had spent decades building drowned me in. Starting in 2016-2017 as I started having to significantly cut my hours I started sculpting again first as a hobby, and was so excited to move from my previous mediums of metal and mixed media to glass casting and porcelain paperclay sculpting (I still use some metal, fiber, adobe, and mixed media in my work) which opened whole new worlds to me and when I had to stop working entirely art saved my mind and heart. Not having the ability to sculpt the past 1.5 years has taken a huge mental toll on me. It is my best therapy for PTSD, anxiety, and even reduces my pain levels in certain parts of my body.

With your help I can be an artist and educator again!

I really need help to make it through this winter. I am applying for grants and scholarships as well. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.