- I'm in Stone Ridge, New York to visit with artist, Jacinta Bunnel.

Let's go.

- I grew up in a working class rural town in Pennsylvania.

My mother and my stepfather worked long hours and so I spent a lot of time at home alone making homemade bookmarks and making latch hook rugs, learning different crafts.

And it was the solitariness that actually pushed me to keep creating because it kept my mind active.

But I never thought of myself as an artist or even considered going to art school or taking an art class at all.

(upbeat pop music) It really wasn't until I moved to the Hudson Valley when I was 22 and was immersed in just a sea of creative people and artists and musicians that people started noting that some of my creations were actually art.

I've worked with everything from paint to found paper and collage, to fiber arts, and I also have a few children's books that I have written.

For the longest time, I really was profoundly interested in found paper, vintage antique receipts and musical notes and calendars and finding ways to incorporate them into mixed media work.

One project that I worked on was I collected drawings by children that I knew, and then I replicated their drawing style and then added my own flair.

I had a show at a gallery where I showed my art side by side with theirs.

That was also part of me learning how to be an artist.

I loved how free children were and how unencumbered by rules, so I watched them and learned from them and their art making.

(whimsical chiming music) It wasn't until the pandemic that I started working with latch hook rugs.

It felt like I was a latchkey kid again, which I was when I was a child.

A latch hook rug was popularized in the seventies and eighties through kits that you would buy in five and dime stores, often with patterns already printed on them like little deer or mushrooms or owls were very popular.

It was a way to bring an art form to everyone.

I started by collecting vintage latch hook rugs from thrift stores and yard sales and then I put a call out to everybody I knew and I started receiving old latch hook rugs in the mail.

I probably had built a collection of about 50 or more when I started sewing them together to be one giant mosaic rug.

One of the things that this project has really done for me was to really help me through one of the more challenging times in my life because I was diagnosed with a brain tumor and then an immune disorder, and so I had to spend many years at home lying down.

I couldn't do what I had normally been doing which was sitting up and making art.

So doing fiber arts again while seated helped me push through to a place where I could start feeling better in my body.

I kind of say that latch hook saved my life.

And then when I added the component for a show that I recently had of collecting stories from other latchkey kids, I felt like there was this group healing that was going on because there was so much loneliness for so many people who were left alone as children.

And we sort of collected our stories together and it was like a little rag tag community of partially parented kids.

In 2001, I was doing a lot of childcare and I had also just left a job as a health educator at Planned Parenthood.

I had founded a group for LGBTQ students in Newburg at the Planned Parenthood there and I was working a lot with young people.

What I saw was a real lack of information and stories about people who were queer or who had queer parents, who were trans, who were non-binary.

So in 2001, I got together with another artist and activist named Irit Reinheimer and we created a photocopied coloring book with found images, but that we changed the words to the images that we found in a psychology textbook or a children's book, and we turned them into dismantling the gender norms.

And it became so much more popular than we expected.

I found a publisher in Brooklyn.

They took that book and we redid it, we redid all the illustrations and that was called, "Girls Will Be Boys will Be Girls Will Be Boys".

And from there I found that I loved that work.

I'm not an illustrator.

I may be an artist, but I'm not an illustrator.

So I continued to make books like, "Sometimes The Spoon Runs Away with Another Spoon", and, "The Big Gay Alphabet", and all along I collaborated with an illustrator who could bring my vision to life.

After working on the coloring books, I decided the direction I wanted to take was to write my first children's book and I called that, "A More Graceful Shaboom".

And in that book I wanted there to be a non-binary character who uses they and them pronouns, who is just having an adventure like in every other children's book.

And there is no part of the book that is pointing out who this person is or who their parents are or why it's important to treat them kindly.

They're just being a regular kid.

Art is a place where I can get lost and I can wash away the worries.

Really, it's an, like people talk about being in the zone or a state of flow and that's really how I feel when I am making art.

I would like people to come away from my work feeling joy and feeling connected to other humans.

(upbeat pop music)