​I’m Liz Kovarsky (she/her), a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and social worker based in Brunswick, Maine—and I’m the founder of Electric Cottage Collective.

My path has been anything but linear: My family moved frequently in my early life, so I was the outsider who adapted to each new town, school and social group. Painting became my anchor amidst the uncertainty, and I’d spend hours in my room as a teenager, lost in color and time, painting everything in sight—including my bedroom walls, much to my parents’ disapproval!

Art became a portal to another world, and I felt most alive when I was creating.

At MassArt, I was introduced to other weirdos like me, who wanted to rebel and challenge the status quo through various artistic mediums. We’d stay up all night, painting the town (literally). As a community, we believed that art had the power to transform, and that belief carried me through many more years of living in San Francisco as an art teacher, printmaker, dance and yoga teacher.

I moved again in my twenties, this time to Portland, Maine, to reunite with my best friend, and I became a social worker as a way to deepen my understanding of the very systems that I had been pushing back against for most of my adult life.

I studied trauma, substance use, body-based healing, and systemic oppression. I witnessed how often our institutions, well-intentioned as they may be, fail those they’re meant to support. After five years in this field, my body is beginning began to show signs of burnout or more accurately, the moral injury I’ve experienced as a social worker. 

I feel a deep yearning to return to art. To build community. To facilitate expression. To move my body.

 

To reorient to the question, “Am I moving towards death or am I moving towards life?”​​

Through my journey, I’ve realized: I don’t want to fight against and work within systems that drain our life force. I want to build a new model that renders the old systems obsolete. I want to move towards life.

ECC is that dream: A place where people get lost in time on an art project, exhale their anxieties in a yoga class, and transform their relationship to their bodies through dance. We work alongside each other in our day jobs, sharing ideas, space, energy and inspiration. We connect to what matters and access the courage required to live authentically and move towards what lights us up. We nurture the need for creativity and play, knowing that these very states are imperative for creating the new world we want to live in.