About Sara K. Norris

I was born an artist. There's never been a time in my life when I wasn’t making art and expressing myself creatively.

As soon as I could hold a crayon I began to draw. I remember family members being shocked by the drawings I made at such a young age. To the disbelief of the employees at my local grocery store, I won their Halloween coloring contest when I was just 3 years old. Throughout my entire childhood, if I wasn't reading, I was drawing. 

Once I was in school, the covers and margins of my notebooks were always decorated with doodles and I spent all of my spare time filling sketchbooks.

One year, I was gifted a pink, plastic 110 film camera for Christmas. That changed how I saw the world. I took pictures of everything and even had photoshoots with my hamster. I took so many pictures that I was doing chores around the house just to earn enough allowance to buy and process the film. 

My real obsession with photography began when I discovered my dad’s 35mm Vivitar camera in a closet at around 13 years old. I still have that camera to this day. My high school offered photography classes and the darkroom became my sanctuary. I felt at home spending hours in the darkness under the glow of that red light.

Fast forward a few years, I received my Bachelor of Arts Degree from Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, CA and went on to an internship with a commercial photographer in Boston, MA.

Over the years since then, I’ve moved back and forth from coast to coast working as a freelance photographer, writer, and editor. Then came the burn out. I was exhausted and creatively drained. I fell into depression and stopped making any kind of art for years.

In 2020, during a particularly dark time for me personally, when I felt lost and powerless, I began a daily meditation practice. This was the beginning of my first spiritual awakening. After meditating daily for a few months, I started to see beautiful visions of powerful goddesses that I felt compelled to bring into reality. They seemed to represent different archetypes that embodied a feminine strength that I didn’t possess at the time. But it wasn’t until 2022 that I finally began to combine my love of drawing with my passion for photography and storytelling to make these visions come to life.

The following Christmas I gifted myself an XP Pen graphics tablet. As soon as it arrived the work effortlessly poured out of me. I would sit for hours every day putting dozens of images together into digital collages, then drawing on top of the photos, layering them with digital illustrations to re-create the dreamlike visions from my meditations. These fantasy scenes became my Divine Feminine series.

Whether it's photography, drawing, or writing - my soul is meant to create beauty in the world. Even though there have been times when my creative well ran dry, I know now that I will always find my way back to making art again. Although my process and style has continued to evolve throughout my life, one thing has remained unchanged: I was born an artist.