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About May's Monsters
The Full Story
My name is Sarah-Jane May and I am a multidisciplinary artist from Atlanta, Georgia. I primarily work in sculpture and illustration, and graduated from The Savannah College of Art and Design with a BFA in Sculpture in 2019.
In 2020 amidst the pandemic, I shifted my focus from primarily fine art to my small business and began designing stationery, accessories, and greeting cards while I took a break from my sculptural work. Running May's Monsters has been so fulfilling and exciting and I'm excited to see how it continues to grow!
My Fine Art
In 2021 while working through some mental health struggles and watching several family members have their own health problems, I finally found my way back to creating sculptures.
While listening to the album Dreamland by Glass Animals, I was finally able to emotionally process all the hardship I had been fighting through the past two years and broke down into tears at hearing the end of the album. As I had been listening to the music, it gave me such great inspiration and visualizations of some shadow box pieces I wanted to create exploring these feelings and emotions.
My process for my Cocoon series has been very similar for each of the pieces. I like to explore my feelings and emotions through my connection to slugs and color in these mixed media pieces.
The way I express the emotions and feelings within each piece is typically tied to the colors used with the fiber around the clay pieces. Gold is always meant to represent the true self, who you are at your very core. No matter what we may be currently going through, we are always ourselves underneath all the emotion, the pain, the happiness.
The Business
May’s Monsters has been many things over the years. I originally started out as a special effects makeup artist, and chose the name May’s Monsters when I was pivoting from that to sculptural works and wanted something that would encompass everything. “Monsters” has been a theme in both my SFX and sculptural work and sounded perfectly alliterative with my last name. Hence May’s Monsters was born.
In 2019 I began making stickers as part of a college project and had so much fun with it that I just kept making them. In 2020 I started pursuing more accessory and merchandise design, figuring out what items I enjoyed designing the most and what themes I wanted for my business. I started off with designing fan art of existing shows, games, etc and found that every time I would run out of motivation I would return to drawing my slugs. I then got the idea to start designing slug stationery and my customers online loved them. It's been so wonderful to find my little niche community of other folks who love slugs as much as I do.
I worked for several years for another small business that carried a very large variety of greeting cards, and after some time of looking at all the cool and funny cards I decided I wanted to try designing my own line of greeting cards. Greeting cards feel like such a beautiful art form to me; something people can laugh, smile, or cry at and connect with other humans in such a simple way.
Aside from the bugs and slugs, I also started creating pronoun and pride flag buttons after knowing so many folks with neopronouns that weren't represented by the common pronoun pins and badges. It feels nice as a queer artist to do something that seems so small for our community that has such a big impact. I love being able to offer customized pronoun and pride flag buttons in different colors and designs to help people express themselves in the ways they need to.
Contact me!
Interested in wholesale, collaborating, or just need to ask me something? Send me a message below!