All About
My name is Jody Swanson.
I have lived on the Oregon Coast for nearly 25 years. In 2020 I started Alice Projects, inspired by my love for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, through which I create hand-carved block prints of coastal birds, animals and plants. I also craft my own herbal tea blends. I use my artwork as the packaging for the teas, uniting everything under the Alice Projects name. The art and the teas are all part of the same vision - a way to honor, learn from, and be nourished by the world around us.
I truly love the act of creating. The process of printing an image I have carved onto a piece of paper is thrilling to me every single time. Similarly, learning about the properties of an herb, mixing it with other herbs, and finding their combined beauty, taste and smell, is truly such a joy.
The more I create, the more I learn and hope to improve in both print making and the craft of making teas. It’s a never-ending process of changing and growing. The collections of teas & block prints both reflect the fluidity of the process. As new blocks are carved or new tea blends are made, the older ones fade away.
Alice Projects is my studio of experimentation. There is a lot of trial and error.
Sometimes there is more error than I would like and I feel like I’m flailing. But in the end, I just keep working at it.
The Inspiration Behind
Alice Projects
I have loved and been influenced by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for as long as I can remember. Alice Projects is my ode to Wonderland by way of drawing, carving and printing linoleum blocks, as well as concocting herbal tea blends from dried herbs.
Each of the 8 tea blends showcases a block print image of an herb found in that blend, uniting my passions for block print art and herbal teas.
