Tori Adams is an expressive, quirky art enthusiast from Burlington, North Carolina. Her first love is photography, but she also works as a freelance designer, painter, and fibers craftsman. As a teenager, she worked to create for others, founding her own repurposed clothing boutique, Midnight and Magnolia. Before starting her BFA in Studio Art at Appalachian State University, she volunteered for a non-profit based in Nuremberg, Germany. Her time with Youth with a Mission involved photographically documenting children in South East Asia, bringing awareness to malnutrition and poverty. She enjoys learning processes that inspire her, using them to create mixed media art that both expresses her own inner world, as well as addressing social issues that effect others. The power of an artistic voice is not something that she takes for granted, striving to evoke emotions, and bring attention to the fight for equality in today’s unfair circumstances. Currently Tori resides in Burlington, NC teaching elementary school art . She is always looking for new projects and ventures to explore so if you would like to work with her, please visit the contact page.

Statement from the Artist:

I call myself an artist. 
I make things because it is necessary for my existence. 
Sometime I wonder if I’m doing the right thing with my life.
I care about people. 
I seek out people’s stories, maybe to avoid my own. 
I want to be unique, a special individual. I always have. 
I also want to belong somewhere, apart of the collective.
I want to have a voice and be heard.
I try so hard to relate. 
I want to love someone radically and be intoxicated by it. 
I don’t know what I’m doing half the time when I start a piece, sometimes I wonder if I am a fraud. 
All I know is a wake up, I breathe, and I try to find meaning to this world. 
I’ve been told my whole life that I’m not enough, maybe one day I’ll learn to be enough for myself.
I like colour sometimes, but the textures and feel of things make me remember I am alive. 
I hope my traumas can fade into nothing once the pain of others has stopped. 
I don’t know everything.
I don’t know what I need.
I used to see the universe as black and white, but now I find comfort in the indescribable and unsure.
I want to search but I don’t know if I can ever find, I am only human after all. 
I want to make things that are meaningful for my own sanity as well as speak for those who can’t. 
I want everything I make to spark a conversation, and be absorbed like oxygen in the lungs.
I call myself artist, but who knows what that means anymore?

See. Take in. Enjoy.

-Tori