This is a voice note from my bed, part of my series of reflections on the personal values I’ve pinned to my wall - one at a time.
Today it’s gratitude.
I recorded this back in mid-January, but life got busy and a little messy - multiple emergency vet appointments for my pet, juggling work deadlines, feeling the emotional and financial weight of it all - and I didn’t get around to posting it. I felt stressed, overwhelmed, scattered. I’m sharing it now as a little reminder - to myself, and maybe to you - that keeping a practice alive means practicing it, again and again.
Gratitude is a word that gets bandied around a lot these days, and to be honest, I slightly cringe at it. Just “be grateful!”, we’re told. Urgh. It so easily dismisses the urgent pressures of real life. But my response changes when I remember: it’s not just a word - it’s a practice. Noticing. Naming. Writing down. Simple. And yet, it profoundly shifts how I feel and how I move through the day.
Lately, I’ve let it slip, and I notice immediately how it changes my days: I fixate on difficulty, I skim past what’s alive even in hard moments. Gratitude grounds me, threads through my creative practice, connects the pieces of my life, and lets me see a bigger picture.
In this recording, I share what I’ve noticed, why I’m returning to the practice, and how it helps me stay present - even (especially) in the middle of chaos and uncertainty.
About Gladys Paulus
Gladys Paulus (b. 1973) is a Dutch-Indonesian visual artist, tutor, and coach. Her work sits at the intersection of fine art, traditional crafts, and contemplative practice, exploring the ancestral, emotional, and transformative power of materials.
Drawing on her own layered identity as a queer person of mixed heritage, a descendant of refugee migrants, and a long time student of meditation and embodied practices, Paulus uses textiles - especially wool and felt - as vessels of memory, reflection, and quiet resistance. Her practice often unfolds slowly, inviting touch, time, and attention as part of the making, and honours what is forgotten, unspoken, marginalised, or overlooked.
Felt, with its primal tactility and ancient lineage, allows her to blur boundaries between art and ritual, object and offering. Paulus stretches wool into new dimensions, creating work that is not only seen but felt - as spaces for contemplation, transformation, and embodied experience. Her pieces are quiet acts of defiance against a culture that values speed, utility, and superficiality, offering instead slowness, reverence, and curiosity.
Her practice thrives in the in-between: the sacred and the profane, belonging and not belonging, personal and universal. She is interested in how materials, process, and care can cultivate attentiveness, openness, and connection - to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us.
A fourth-generation artist and maker, Paulus lives and works in Somerset (UK). She is a specialist visiting tutor across the UK, Europe, the USA, and Canada, a former exhibiting member of the 62 Group of textile artists, and is listed on the Crafts Council’s Selected Index of Makers. Her work is held in the collection of the World Museum (Amsterdam) and in private collections across the UK, USA, Canada, and Mexico.
To find out more, visit: www.gladyspaulus.com
