meet the artist (me!) – healing through art

this page is all about the path i took that led me right here. so if you feel like it, come walk with me for a moment.

first off — hi! my name is jule (she/her) and i grew up in hamburg, a pretty big city in northern germany. as a kid, creativity was everywhere: poetry, crafting, drawing, singing, filming sketches. i was always making things with my father and my sister. still, as the youngest, i found myself constantly comparing myself to them and not having much faith in my own talents. it took many years until art truly felt like it came from me — until it claimed its place in my life.

at seventeen, i went abroad alone for the first time and spent a year in france, before returning to finish school back in hamburg. the independence i gained there fueled me, and my growing drive to travel and explore eventually brought me to the other side of the world — peru. living there in my early twenties, something clicked. i reconnected with drawing deeply and intuitively, especially through watercolors. it felt like coming back to something that had been waiting for me all along.

from peru, i moved to berlin to study social work. alongside my studies, i kept drawing — more, freer, stranger. creatures began to appear, my visual language sharpened. eventually, that path led me into tattooing and joining a tattoo collective. my hands were busy, my creativity alive — but mentally, things were getting heavier again.

i’ve lived with depression for many years. during the pandemic, i hit a new low and had to quit my studies to focus on therapy and getting better. but art stayed. creating wasn’t optional anymore — it was how i survived, how i processed, how i stayed connected to myself and how i started healing through art. my relationship to self-expression shifted completely. what i wore, what i made, how i shaped things with my hands became a mirror of what was happening inside.

that’s when working three-dimensionally started to pull me in. playing with clay and wire, experimenting without pressure, i made my first jewelry pieces. one day, i discovered soft soldering — and suddenly, i had a language for emotions i couldn’t put into words. metal, stones, curves and edges became tools for expressing the inner worlds i talk about in my queer jewelry philosophy. working this way turned jewelry into a form of healing through art.

softedgez was born from this process. i knew art was where i wanted to spend my time, and launching a project like softedgez created space for that. jewelry became self-expression, healing, resistance and play at once. but over time, i noticed something was missing: drawing, creatures, fantasy. so i brought them back in — this time through polymer clay. sculpting these beings felt like a bridge between everything i’ve done before: sketching, tattooing, crafting, storytelling. they carry softness, eeriness, tenderness and power — all coexisting, none cancelling the other out.

so here i am — still walking, still experimenting, still creating — slowly, honestly and with care. continuing my own journey of healing through art.

thank you for sharing a bit of this journey with me!