Meet Kyra Matsui
KYRA MATSUI is a Toronto, Canada-based artist and jewelry designer. You can find her work at her website Iron Lace Design, her Etsy shop, and Facebook.
Kyra spoke to the Catholic Artist Connection about her work:
I live in Toronto, Canada. I’ve lived here my whole life aside from college in Ottawa. I actually live in the house where I grew up. I inherited it from my parents.
I am an artist who is a Catholic. I don’t specifically call myself a Catholic artist because my work isn’t primarily religious. My mission, as I see it, is to do the work that I am good at, and to serve it as well as I can. There’s a bit in one of Madeleine L'Engle’s journals about the importance of not allowing yourself and your worries about your inadequacy to interfere in serving the work that you are doing. That has been very helpful in vanquishing fear and ego.
Where have I found support in the Church? Primarily online. I’m a convert, and the people supporting me through and after my conversion were almost all in online communities. I’ve formed very strong friendships and community through groups of lay people, primarily. I read a lot - I came to the Church through reading, and one of the things that really attracted me was the witness of Catholic writers, especially Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton and the Desert Fathers.
I still feel very new as a working artist. I’ve only been selling my work for about five years, and those years have been personally tumultuous, so I don’t have a strong sense of that yet. I haven’t met anyone yet who is doing the kind of jewelry that I make, so I’ve had to effectively invent my own apprenticeship. I had a background in amateur costume history - I fell in love with costume history when I was a teenager - and I’ve dabbled in fibre art, so that’s the skill set I’m drawing upon, treating chainmail like fabric. So I have my eye on some jewelry design and metalworking courses, but I need both the time and the money to take them. Eventually!
Where do I find spiritual fulfillment? At Mass, and in prayer and conversation with friends. I attend Mass at St. Michael’s Basilica downtown when I’m able - I have four special needs children and I’m a single mother, so regular attendance is difficult.
Where do I find artistic fulfillment? I’m still quite new as a working artist, but I spend a lot of time at the Royal Ontario Museum, and at the Art Gallery and the research library. In the past couple of years, I’ve been able to fly out to go to the Met and the MFA in Boston, and that was glorious.
What is my daily spiritual practice? I slide in and out of various types. I usually manage the morning offering, I have done the morning and evening Psalms, and I’m in a messaging prayer group with a few other women of deep faith, and we trade prayer requests on and off throughout the day.
Daily artistic practice? As I mentioned, I’m a working mother, so I’m really good at working in short bursts and with frequent interruptions. My craft is quite physically demanding, so I can only do a maximum of four hours per day. The rest is experimenting, playing with new techniques, research, administration and marketing.
My perfect day would be to go see an amazing display at a gallery or spend a few hours researching historical costume and jewelry, and then come home and spend a few hours at my workbench trying out new designs. I love it. I think the things that are most important to an artist are exposure - to be in conversation with research or art or people who inspire you - and play. Holy leisure, the time when you are really absorbed in trying things that interest you, and pushing at yourself to develop new skills.
How do I financially support my artistic career? As I said above, I have a house because I inherited it. I was my parents’ only child, and the house passed to me when they died a few years ago. I’m very grateful. Otherwise I couldn’t afford to live in Toronto - it’s a very expensive city.
I support us about half with my work and half through a government system that provides children’s caregivers with financial aid, called the Child Tax Benefit. My oldest has multiple disabilities and we receive a stipend to help with his care. Business is continuing to grow, and I’m hoping to be able to fully support us within a couple of years.
I sort of fell into working by accident - I had been active in the Catholic blogging community ten or twenty years ago, and I had made a lot of friends, so when I started selling things I made, I had contacts who would help. It’s been largely word of mouth. I recommend both having a strong online presence (web page, instagram, Facebook) and being ready to talk to people about what you do.
If you are an artist in Toronto, the ROM and the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) both have relatively inexpensive memberships, and they’re a wonderful way to see a lot of beautiful things. Toronto is littered with great coffee shops and brew pubs and bars. I like C'Est What! and Northwood and Bar Raval, and I hole up at the Toronto Reference Library for hours. I’m told the Robarts Library at University of Toronto is fantastic, and I’m planning on going once things start to reopen. There’s a bunch of options for co working spaces and classes through Craft Ontario - I was just about to go down and look before the pandemic happened. Soon.
