Today we’d like to introduce you to Kristin Dieng.
Kristin, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I became an artist after the life I had spent years building became impossible for me to continue.
I have always been an explorer at heart. From a young age, I was fascinated by the enormous diversity of the world: its people and cultures, history and ideas, landscapes and beautiful places, and all the different ways human beings create and live. I studied abroad in Australia and Senegal and later built a nearly two-decade career in international affairs, working in security analysis, international cultural exchange, and human rights. My work required me to be endlessly curious, to absorb new information, understand complicated situations, navigate different cultures, and continually learn about a world that was always changing. I loved that.
Then chronic migraines made my world very small.
By my mid-thirties, migraines that had begun in childhood had become so severe that I could no longer work. For many years I was largely bed-bound, and the contrast was enormous. I had spent my life wanting to see more, learn more, go more places, and understand more. Suddenly, much of my existence was confined to my home and to the unpredictable limits of my own body.
When new treatments eventually gave me back some functionality, I began experimenting with a variety of different art forms. When I discovered stained glass, something clicked, and that feeling really exploded when I began creating stained glass mixed media art.
I was surrounded again by things that made me curious.
Sheets of glass filled with extraordinary colors and textures. Agate slices whose patterns had been slowly formed by nature. Semiprecious stones and beads. Beautiful frames. Materials that changed completely when held up to the sun. I could pick up something that delighted me without having any idea what it would become.
And I could explore again. For the first time in a long time, I felt that pull toward discovery again.
Having a chronic illness had changed my world, both the physical world around me and the internal world within me. But when I discovered stained glass art, I realized that the explorer in me hadn’t disappeared.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The hardest part of chronic illness is not only the pain itself. It is the loss of control over your own life.
I wake up each morning without knowing what my body will allow me to do that day. I may be dealing with severe pain, nausea, imbalance, or cognitive and language difficulties. Plans become tentative. Things I want to do may have to be abandoned. Even on better days, there is always an awareness that my capacity can change quickly.
That uncertainty extends beyond me. I am also the mother of three children, two of whom live with chronic migraines as well. As a family, we are constantly adjusting around what each person’s body can manage. It can make life feel both intensely stressful and strangely static at the same time.
That combination has been particularly difficult for me because I have always thrived on discovery, movement, learning, and new experiences. Chronic illness doesn’t just restrict what I can do. It can make life feel stagnant and inward-looking, with an enormous amount of attention directed toward symptoms, limitations, and what might go wrong.
Art gives me a place where some of those same realities can be transformed.
There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the way I create. I rarely know what a finished piece will look like when I begin. But unlike the uncertainty of illness, which so often closes possibilities down, creative uncertainty opens them up.
I can make a choice simply because something is beautiful. I can follow an unexpected direction. I can change my mind. I can experiment without knowing whether something will work and be surprised.
Perhaps most importantly, I get to direct my attention towards somewhere other than my body. For a while, instead of asking, “What am I physically capable of today?” I can ask, “What happens if I put this here?”
That may sound like a small shift, but to me it isn’t. In my art, not knowing what comes next is exciting.
Art has not made my chronic illness disappear. In fact, the physical work of creating a mosaic can exacerbate my migraines, so I am constantly negotiating how much I can do. But creativity gives me pockets of time in which uncertainty becomes possibility, limitation gives way to exploration, and my attention is captured by something beautiful rather than by pain.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I create one-of-a-kind stained glass mosaic artwork filled with color, texture, natural materials, and light. My work often depicts the natural world, such as trees stretching into colorful skies, mountains meeting the sea, forests, sunsets, and landscapes. I also love creating mandalas and intricate designs inspired by Islamic geometry.
The adventure begins with the materials.
I am endlessly delighted by beautiful things: sheets of stained glass swirling with unexpected colors and textures, translucent agate slices with patterns created over millions of years, semiprecious stone beads, and unusual frames. I collect materials because something about them catches my attention long before I know what they will become.
When I begin a piece, I usually have a theme but not a plan. I don’t work from a detailed drawing or predetermined pattern. I find that would take away one of the things I love most about creating, which is the possibility of discovery.
Instead, I begin cutting and arranging. I might place a piece of glass and realize it changes everything around it. An agate slice might unexpectedly become a sunset, a rock outcropping, treetop foliage, or the center of a mandala. I follow one decision into the next, responding to the materials as the composition slowly reveals itself.
There is a point when the design begins to feel as though it has its own momentum. Rather than imposing an image I’d already decided upon, I feel like I am in conversation with my materials, partnering with something larger than myself and discovering the artwork as I create it.
That means I get to be surprised too.
And then sunlight changes everything.
A finished piece hanging on a wall can be beautiful, but stained glass truly comes alive in a window. Sunlight pours through transparent and translucent glass, stones, and beads, illuminating details that can almost disappear in ordinary light. Colors become luminous. Textures glow. Glass and agates that seemed beautiful in my hands reveal something entirely different when the sun finds them.
And the artwork refuses to stay still.
As the sun moves, colored light and refractions travel across the surrounding room. Clouds change the intensity. Morning light is different from afternoon light. The angle of the sun changes with the seasons. The design is never experienced in exactly the same way twice.
I love that I don’t have the final word in what my artwork becomes. I create the design, but light keeps creating and changing it with me.
Perhaps this is what I am most proud of. I begin with individual items such as pieces of glass, stones, beads, and other materials that caught my attention because each was beautiful in its own way, and intuitively bring them together into something I couldn’t have completely envisioned beforehand. Then I place that creation in the path of sunlight and relinquish control once more.
The result is not simply an image to look at. It is an experience of color, light, movement, nature, and continual change.
After spending so much of my life in circumstances that can feel static, I find something deeply satisfying and joyful about creating art that is so insistently alive.
What matters most to you?
What matters most to me is staying connected to life. To the people I love. To the larger world. To beauty and nature. And to that part of myself that can still be surprised by something wonderful.
Long before I became an artist, I believed the world was vast and endlessly interesting, and that paying attention to it mattered. Chronic illness changed my ability to move through that world, but it didn’t change my need to feel connected to it.
All of my life experiences have also made me think differently about joy.
I don’t think joy requires everything to be okay. I don’t think beauty cancels out pain, or that finding something wonderful means we have failed to acknowledge what is difficult. My experience has taught me almost the opposite. Pain and beauty can occupy the same space. Grief and wonder can exist beside one another. And a difficult day can still contain something luminous.
Sometimes we have to deliberately make room for it.
For me, art is one way I do that.
Perhaps that is why I make work that is so full of color, movement, nature, and light. I am not interested in pretending darkness doesn’t exist. I am interested in remembering that darkness is never the only thing there is to see.
That is also what I hope someone might experience when they bring one of my pieces into their own home. Yes, I hope they love the artwork itself, the colors, the textures, and all of the design’s tiny details. But I also know that every once in a while, sunlight will catch it unexpectedly and colors will burst across the surrounding walls and floors, interrupting what had previously felt like an ordinary day.
Maybe a patch of blue appears across the floor. Maybe the glass suddenly glows in a way it didn’t yesterday. Maybe they stop for just a moment to watch the flickering, color-filled light, reminding them that beauty and discoveries will exist all around us no matter what our location.
And maybe that small interruption reminds them to look around and discover the beauty that is still there.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kristindieng.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristindiengart/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KristinDiengArt
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristin-dieng/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kristindieng1282
