Many of my long-time readers, friends, and supporters know that over the years I’ve combined my values for clean energy, conservation, and consumer re-use, and the many essays I’ve written about these topics, with also running both an online and bricks-and-mortar vintage shop. This is where I also share my broadsides, poster art, and fiber arts.
Adding to the stew are my passions for history, America, Virginia, and Christianity. These things make perfect sense to me as a whole, a gestalt if you will, of centuries of material culture and spiritual culture and how that feeds into my life purpose — or what it means to be a person living with mindfulness in our glutted world during the dirty (and yet amazing) fossil fuel age.
Over the years, these values have taken deeper hold of me, and I’m finding even more clarity in writing about energy, consumerism, and our role in climate chaos in my essays and through the art of my broadsides. I put my ideas into practice by selling vintage, antique, and gently used goods because they already exist in the world and therefore ask almost nothing new from the industrial economy, except when they’re being cleaned or shipped, both low-impact activities compared to making things new.
Previously my project as just “Lindsay Curren Art and Essays” didn’t feel like it captured how important history and historic precedent is to what I do. But history is everything to what I’m trying to do because, of all human history, the fossil fuel age is a singular, and singularly damaging, anomaly when it comes to resource use, consumption, and waste. We need history and all it’s bequeathed to us, to carve a better path forward, including with all its stuff.
Say Hello to Lady Virginia
That said, I’ve been looking for a way to bring this all together in one way that captures graceful living (in both senses of “grace”), continues making a case for how re-use is the greenest option (and one that’s amply abundant) for consumers. To that end, I’m changing the name of my website — lindsaycurren.com — and the name of my Etsy shop — formerly Lindsay’s List — to Lady Virginia Vintage.
For me, Lady Virginia Vintage brings all this together, uniting my values, my art, my historic reenactment, and my online and in person selling. But…but…that doesn’t mean I won’t continue my essays on energy, economy, and ecology. In fact just the opposite. I will be doing more of that writing as it relates to how we live, what impact we make, and the gigantic plethora of options we have for buying and digging all the cool stuff of the world while still having an amazingly gracious lifestyle.
The thing is, currently I’m a ghostwriter for others. So much of my brain-time goes into producing writing for clients that my essays are fourth and fifth in line. After I spend my time writing for others, I’m less psyched to sit back down at the computer to write for me, and for you, my audience. I want to be out there learning, discovering, sourcing, and interacting in real life. Not the Internet of things thank you very much, but the real web, the interconnectedness of people, stuff, and fun — the texture of life!
My goal with a new name, and a reinvigorated focus, is to begin to wean off of my writing clients, and put all that freed up time in the service of my own project, Lady Virginia Vintage.
It’s the same stuff you’ve gotten before, my essays, my art, my vintage shops, just with a different name. I hope you’ll share and like my new Instagram page (totally in its infancy) @LadyVirginiaVintage, and hopefully soon my Facebook page, Lindsay Curren Art & Essays will also be under this name.
Warmly,
Lindsay Curren aka Lady Virginia
