Today we’d like to introduce you to Britt Malia Neubacher
Britt Malia, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
At 19 I hurled myself into a Social Services career and spent 15 years endeavoring to create safer spaces for traumatized women and teens. Having grown up in Hawai’i –a place seeped in the sacred, and raised by a Mom who filled our home with big beauty on little money, it was natural to continue the tending tradition of my youth. Crisis work further elucidated the solid tie between physical environment and wellbeing; the more nature bits we incorporated into our programs, the better everyone felt. Midnight gardening became my refuge from this high intensity work and eventually the tiny environs I styled for my own sanity opened an unexpected path into full-time self-employment as a plant artist.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Graveled silk! A hardy blend of struggle and flow. I am a fan of ease but I’m also a growth junkie, thus continually challenging myself well beyond my limits and better judgement. This is painful but usually worthwhile. Valuing and sharing the work has taught me a ton but the real riches have been in sticking it out no matter how scary and uncertain the path. For me, feeling stable and secure has proven to be mostly an inside job so forgoing a steady paycheck and retirement plan is simply *what’s up* day after day. We’ll see about tomorrow.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
For the past 20 years with this gig, I’ve stuck green on every possible (and less than possible) surface. It’s been a lot of fun bringing the outdoors inside in as many cool ways as nature will allow, From studio work and gallery shows to living walls and large-scale nature-take-over scenes, I’ve befriended fear, heights, countless construction crews and some badass floral designers willing to scale 25′ H rafters with me. To date I’m most proud of the projects that Rick Froberg joined in on upon his much-celebrated homecoming to San Diego in 2022. Rick was my life-long friend and favorite artist who eventually became my Person with a capital P, so it was a total dream to co-create a 3-sided/13 foot preserved plant pyramid for a showcase at the San Diego Museum of Art, and directly afterwards, surrealist design for the Orchid award-winning Mothership bar. Rick died suddenly the following year, on the heels of my two other closest family members. My devastation suggested that I had nothing left to creatively (or otherwise) offer but that has been shifting lately. Among other things, I’ve gotten to learn how to heal trauma, old and new, and gradually stop arguing with my new reality. I’m now incorporating trauma-informed design principles into my art and am launching a service for styling residential, commercial, and institutional spaces with the same nervous-system-settling science. This is an emerging and much-needed field and it feels meaningful to be able to contribute something to it. Loss has led me back home to space-healing, and strangely, to myself.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I’m lucky to live in a place that values my work and I feel fortunate to have a creative home among so many artists, craftspeople, and designers who value community over individualism. San Diego is not as cutting edge or financially compensating as other major cities but it does produce diverse, solid, and refreshingly laid-back talent. In my experience you don’t have to watch your back or compete for work in the same way that creatives in other major cities do. The opportunities may not be as sexy or career-making as we’d like but there’s a lot of room for community-building in the way of sharing resources, ideas, and clients for the good of the whole. I would not have made it to day 2 without such a supportive community and in turn, nothing makes me happier than involving my cohorts in good projects. Paying luck forward is the move!
Pricing:
- $150-up
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.tendliving.com
- Instagram: tendliving
Image Credits
Photo credit Tomoko Matsubayashi and Flight Feather Photography
