Sydney Evans | Artist Story: from adolescent dream to spiritual journey
I'm Sydney - a Canadian artist and fashion designer. My career started in fashion after attending school in New York and Milan for fashion design. As a multi-faceted designer, my career has been a journey of zigging and zagging through what feels right and leaving what hasn't served me.
From a young age, I knew what I aspired to. My parents were growth mindset people and brought us kids through it with them (for which I am eternally grateful). I know I’m in this life for a spiritual purpose expressed through creativity. When I was 12 yrs old, my dad took me to a T. Harv Ekar seminar in Vancouver about finding your life purpose. Little me sitting in a room of hundreds of 35-55 year olds trying to uncover their life purpose. That's where I defined my dream - to become a fashion designer, start my brand and live in a beach villa in Italy where I would ride around on a red Vespa with my hot Italian boyfriend. Let's just say my life purpose was superficially influenced by my love for Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen movies *cough* When in Rome. But when I got home, I started researching and planning, setting my sights on my dream school, the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC and an abroad program in Italy. And that's exactly what I did. At 17, I moved to New York City, really testing the strength of my parent’s trust.
I thought I would start my business within 5 years of graduating, or that was the naive goal. I worked my ass off for it, but owning any business is hard, but especially a fashion brand where there is an allure of money that doesn't really exist in the company. Most successful fashion start-ups don't hit black until potentially 4 years into the business, which is likely between 8-16 seasonal collections, of which you need money to fund.
Fighting My Biggest Resistor, Myself
To say it was intimidating is an understatement, and the biggest obstacle I consistently hit was something no one prepared me for. The Truth: I was my biggest obstacle and resistance. I faced this in so many ways.
A soul-led dream manifests into a Spiritual Journey
I had chosen a Purpose-led pursuit, which I believe is a soul contract. You can seek advice and education on how to do something from a million different sources, but at the end of the day, the only thing that will tell you what is right for you is that very subtle pull from within. And when you let the external volume get too loud, the internal whisper of your intuition isn't heard. I found myself constantly rerouting to come back “home” to who I am, all before I knew who I was.
I started a spiritual journey, of which I could not anticipate the direction and places it would take me. A year after graduating in NYC, I moved back home to Calgary, Canada. Energetically it's a stark difference. I had to get comfortable with the quiet again after 5+ years of living in constant stimulation. New York living taught me the nuances of what energy feels like. There is nothing like tapping into the energy of the concrete jungle where dreams are made. But as a ManiGen, I had no idea how much it influenced me. I never slowed or stopped, denying myself from tapping into my own energy and intuition, or what I consider my compass that points me to my true north. Coming home and living on an acreage outside the city was a startling lesson on mindfulness and intention and a beautiful reintroduction to myself. That's when I started getting into spirituality and learning about energy. Over the next 10+ years, Everything I believed and understood was shattered and I had to put it back together with my new chosen beliefs. My love of fashion was no exception to this.
Fashion and Style has always been an expression of my soul. This is where it all began for me. But I lost my love along the way. I got wrapped up in what I was taught in school, in my career and the people in my life. As I dove into the realm of spirituality and enlightenment, everything I saw happening in the fashion industry repulsed me - it's one of the largest silent contributors to environmental and social issues we face globally; I could see the perpetual treadmill of trends increasing in speed to an unsustainable level; and not to mention the continual message of external gratification to fill the lack or insecurity the world and industry projects onto us, primarily in women. I didn't know how to be in the industry and still be a person of integrity. I skirted around the edge for years, working in the industry or adjunct, working on my art and personal work when inspiration struck - never letting go of the dream, but also never giving myself the grace that would come with letting go and surrendering. Fashion had been so much of my identity, I didn't know who I would be without it. It was terrifying.
A Soul Ancestry
This one will probably be controversial, but I must speak to it - I am a white woman whose soul has long called her to African soil, history and people. When my feet touch that red earth, my soul feels like it has finally come home. Many of my spirit guides I talk and pray to speak an ancestry that does not match my skin colour. It's a concept most people will never understand, feeling a spiritual attachment to a skin colour that isn’t yours. I understand this as part of my journey - to bridge the divide and be a bridge for others to come together.
Cultural appropriation is strongest in the arts, and particularly in fashion it's not just accepted but praised and taught. Recently, I went through school projects, my first assignment for my first-semester fashion art class required us to “pick a culture to design a swimsuit collection based on”. I chose Inuit wanting to tap into a culture honouring my home. I did not honour the culture - I was 17 not knowing that the cultural appropriation I had been taught and was perpetuating was wrong. I learned this quickly over the next few years as I travelled, but I didn’t see the vast appropriation that exists until I fully integrated myself into other cultures and people, not for inspiration but because my soul called me to connection.
I was a product of the system I was educated in - a system I later learned lied about so many things to its children and people to further their colonial, capitalist agenda. There was much stigma in school about copying other designers, but no one talked about cultural appropriation, which is in essence the same thing. I have learned that copying other artists and designers is a practice in learning, and is in many ways essential to finding your artistic style - you learn from copying, but that’s not your art. It’s a stepping stone in the process of inspiration, digestion, rest, and reinvention to formulate something authentic to you. But when it comes to cultural inspiration, we do the opposite. We put ourselves in their world only as much as we need to distill the parts we like without actually immersing ourselves in their world. Every culture and language carries essences of their lifestyle that can’t be replicated by someone who doesn’t wholly emerge themselves, mind, body, and soul. When a language dies, there are entire ways of being that are lost with it - untranslatable words that carry entire ways of being that don’t exist outside.
Much of my art carries an essence of African tribal art, the beautiful people, the energy and most importantly how it makes my world come alive. I am deeply conscious that I am not here to take from the culture anything I can not give back with interest and then some. If I can not lift up from where I am standing, I am not standing in the right place.
Giving way to New purpose, reigniting all Purpose
In 2019, I became a mother and although my world shifted, that tether from my soul to my dream never wavered. I put so much pressure on myself in that first year of motherhood to try to create, but in taking care of a newborn while simultaneously watching my relationship unravel before me, I turned off - turned off my passion and my emotions. I flipped that switch inside to not feel anything - the survival mechanism of self-preservation. It was a deeply spiritual lesson on duality - when you turn off the hard stuff, you also turn off your capacity to feel love and joy. As a new mother, staring down into the eyes of the most beautiful child I've ever seen, not feeling was the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced. Everything I had learned about the subconscious mind and trauma haunted me. I remember one night at the peak of it all, with my revelation of how numb I was, I was desperate to feel - I put on a sad movie to just cry. Usually, when I am in the right space, I'll cry at a commercial that moves me. But this night, I put on the ultimate tear-jerker, Precious, and by the end of it, having not shed a single tear, I knew I had to leave for the sake of my child - so she may grow up knowing love and joy. What does this have to do with my art? It took this profound spiritual lesson to finally understand that a spiritual journey is not all love and light. Evolution does not exist unless you choose to walk through darkness. And into darkness, I walked.
My relationship ended a few months before Covid hit. I moved back in with my parents, quarantining with family. This was my metamorphosis. Before, I felt completely lost, healing from my relationship, and despite having designed for years I still felt like I didn’t know myself or my artistic style. I knew what I liked to wear and what clothes I liked to design, but when it came to putting pen to paper, I was completely blocked. I decided to take the pressure off. I bought a giant bottle of India ink, hit up the dollar store for a stack of super cheap sketchbooks, and every evening after my kiddo went to sleep, I’d put on DJ D-Nice’s Club Quarantine and paint, filling the pages of my sketchbooks with no reservation until after a few weeks I started to see “my style” coming through on the pages. This was my pivot point, when the soul-bound purpose became truly tangible. When it transitioned from “I was put here to create” into what I was creating having legs enough to speak for itself.
Understanding my Energetic Flow
It was almost a decade into my spiritual, energetic journey before I started to understand My energy. After reading my Human Design chart, I started putting it all together, understanding which energy centers were open and susceptible to influence. There are two ways I interact and feel energy. The first one, which has always been easy for me to understand, is very creative, speaking the language of pattern recognition and ideas. I see colours and patterns everywhere (beyond what the natural eye sees). For me, energy in it’s purest form is like a prism, rainbow and iridescent. I can see different types of energy in different colours like in chakra centres and auras, and I often see patterns in objects, like seeing pictures in the clouds, or isometric patterns in open space like a psychedelic trip. I receive inspiration and ideas from everything and distill them into how to tangibly make them manifest. I’m a designer, so that’s the language I’m comfortable with. Realizing that my top two chakras in my head are open as the portals of inspiration from the world finally made everything make sense.
The truest language of my intuition is emotional. This is how I hear the world, my guides and god speak to me. My heart chakra or will centre is open, which means I am constantly receiving energy through it, and am susceptible to the emotional energy and desires of the world around me. This is great as a survival mechanism, but is very challenging when it comes to thriving. As I child I struggled to feel safe and seen as whole and worthy of love, I could feel everything and was often having emotional outbursts from being overwhelmed by other people’s energy. I learned to read people’s energy as a protective mechanism. Over the years, my vibrant, bright expression through fashion and art was really the only way I allowed myself to be seen, but even that I struggled with. It wasn’t until I understood this energy centre being open that I started to feel empowered in overcoming the people-pleaser in me. Having an understanding that I need to physically remove myself from other people’s energy and align with my own to know what’s right for me - was a game changer. I spent my whole life being a people pleaser, and used to easily allow other people to come in and take over making decisions for me, even when they weren’t in alignment with what I wanted. I was never good about defending my will because I had to physically remove myself to know what I wanted which felt so wrong. For years, I thought I just didn’t care, even though clearly down the line it caught up with me. I couldn’t understand Why I responded it that way, or how to fulfill my needs.
Conquering my Own Biases + Beliefs
We all think we know, but you never truly KNOW something until you live it. Single parenthood is hard AF. Especially when you’re trying to do it consciously, honouring yourself, your kid and your co-parent - you can’t raise a well-regulated child when you’re allowing chaos in your parenting relationship. These past 4 years have been a cascade of spiritual lessons, over and over again. Remember how I said I had to unravel all my old beliefs and replace them with new, intentional beliefs? At the core of all of those new beliefs is one core belief - that everything that happens to us is the universe responding to our energy, a product of our thoughts, beliefs and actions. It can be one of the scariest and equally most empowering beliefs to take on - it makes you 100% accountable for your reality. Everything exists in duality. You can’t fall in love without also carrying the risk of heartbreak. You can’t consciously choose empowerment, evolution and change without the radical accountability that comes with that change. In making that choice, I carried the cards and the load. Blaming anyone for the subconscious beliefs that I carry or carried doesn’t do anything but revert me back to my victim mindset or low-self energy.
It’s all a Spiritual Journey
My young adolescent self was overwhelmed but What I had to accomplish along my path to my dream, but I had no idea Who I would have to become to walk this path. It was never about the destination, but the journey.
This business is personal for me, a spiritual journey starting when I was 12 years old. The name Syke was birthed in my second year of college by my then-boyfriend, the only man whose masculine has ever made me feel secure to be fully in my feminine. 14 years later, the meaning behind Syke hit me like a god-spoken revelation that brought me to tears - Syke (pronounced psych) is all about the psyche or the mind. My spiritual journey has been a lesson in creating balance in the mind, body, soul connection, which for me involves healing my mind. The revelation was divine in that my purpose has always been to help myself and others to “come back home to themselves”, find their authentic expression when they are tapped in and fully aligned, which for myself and many means pulling attention away from the mind to activate their soul and healing their subconscious so they can live their purpose. Sometimes you have to trust the road you’re called to with no logical understanding. When you follow passion and soul, the answers will be revealed when you need them.