LOVEDAY FUNCK

What happens when you're told you don't belong and you decide to create your own place anyway?

Louisiana artist and writer Loveday Funck has spent more than a decade proving that sometimes the best thing you can do with someone else's expectations is ignore them. When Loveday was younger, she was told that she didn't really have artistic talent.She became an artist anyway. Today, she has spent more than a decade making and selling her work professionally at art markets and festivals throughout Louisiana. Her creative life has grown far beyond one medium or one definition of what an artist is supposed to be. She creates visual art, writes novels and nonfiction, makes audio projects, and explores improv and stand-up.

“I’m not very good at staying in one creative lane,” she says. And she's finally stopped feeling like she needs to.

That same instinct — following what catches her attention and seeing where it leads — is at the heart of her newest body of work, The Unbelongings.

Loveday has always been drawn to things that feel “a little strange, a little forgotten, or slightly out of place.” Old photographs. Antique imagery. Folklore. Fairy tales. Abandoned things. Odd little objects with a history.

She describes her work as beautiful, but sometimes a little unsettling, “like there’s a story there you don’t completely know.”

The Unbelongings takes that fascination with the overlooked and out-of-place and turns it inward.

The series explores figures and forms that don't quite fit where they're expected to. They can be strange, funny, melancholy, and tender all at once. And that's what makes the series feel so personal. Because most of us know what it feels like to wonder whether we belong. We've been told we're not good enough. We're not talented enough. We're not supposed to make a living doing what we love. We're supposed to choose one path, stay in our lane, and fit neatly into whatever box makes sense to everyone else.

Loveday chose something different. She kept making. She kept exploring. And she kept following the creative rabbit holes that interested her, “for absolutely no practical reason.” Now, that refusal to stay in one lane has become part of her artistic voice.

The Unbelongings is a collection about the things that don't quite fit and perhaps a reminder that not belonging where you were expected to belong can sometimes be the beginning of something entirely your own.