Jasmine “Jaz” Parks is the one woman show that is childlike creative. I initially created the business and brand as a way of coping with the horrors I experienced while being in grad school in July of 2022. I consider this project my first real push towards being a working artist and entrepreneur in a serious and potentially viable way.

I am very influenced and inspired by children and how they navigate and negotiate life, experimenting and responding to everything. They are candid, honest, bold, and they believe they can do anything and be anything or anyone. They decide to do something, and then they do. I admire their resilience, reliance on intuition, playful experimentation, and simple discovery of what it is like to be a human in the world through questioning and doing.

Childlike Creative is the manifestation of both my personal ethos as an artist and the name of the business and brand I’ve created. My various degrees and exploration of academic disciplines mixed with my broad work and life experiences have resulted in an interesting personal and professional approach to creating art. In my visual, digital, or craft art, I often use combinations of words, textures, color, and shapes to process and work through concepts, thoughts, feelings, and ideas of my inner world as a way to make sense of them and the world around me. Much of my work is inspired by nostalgia and capturing universal human experience through very specific-to-me images, objects, and stories. As a writer and musician, the process of my practice is much more intuitive.

Art gives me a tangible way to connect to others and the world and myself in a way that transcends language and personhood—though for the first time, I realize it’s power is drawn from my own live’s experiences and who I am. THAT is what makes art powerful. It’s honest, real, and raw now. I think there’s a crossroads that every artist faces (that i’m facing right now) where their practice and lives calls them in deeper. It asks for authenticity and vulnerability. NOT palatability, likeability, or the ability to be consumed. As art imitates life, I am finally at a point where I understand at least in this moment, who I am. I have an idea of the life I’m after and what I truly want. As well as what I require to be a healthy and functioning person in an honest and sustainable way. I’ve spent my life surviving, and I am unable to wear the mask I created for myself all those years ago that was necessary to make it this far but is no longer is needed. Now, I am transforming into a person who simply wants to live. Really live this one very short, painful, messy, wonderous, beautiful, one-of-a-kind life, and I believe art and this business is the vehicle towards my deepest goals and desires.

Childlike Creative’s studio/office space is based in Knoxville, TN, but will soon transition to Cleveland, OH as a home base in the near future.