Life & Work with Brianna Harbinson

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brianna Harbinson.

Hi Brianna, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
My story has continued to be a long strange trip. I have been a multi-creative all of my life, always tinkering with something and almost always hogging the household scissors and tape! I loved watching my mother shoot her Minolta camera and became fascinated with the concept of freezing time into an image. In 2012, while attending college to pursue an associate in fine art photography, I had a grand-mal seizure in the middle of a math test.

Even though the situation called for me to drop out of college, I kept on shooting my brand-new DSLR. During that time I gave up on my dream of a career in the arts as I was dealing with a brain that had lost sense in time, balance, reading, and speaking. Though the world surrounding me was more difficult to navigate, photography became a way for me to escape into a framed world that was all visual language.

Thus I continued shooting over the years as a mental therapist. The seizure was one of the best things that happened to me and I am very thankful for the reset it forced. Seriously! It tripped me into a massive journey to heal my brain, and years later, heal my PTSD from sustained mental and sexual abuse.

My dexterity started to improve with the use of herbal plant medicine and in 2018 I decided to enroll in a technical college for welding. I was lucky to stumble my way into sanitary welding, which is a very niche type of this industry. My skill set continued to improve and I was allowed to travel weld throughout the US. What luck for a photographer! As you can imagine, the camera was my copilot and I took enough photos to warrant a new hard drive purchase.

Fast forward to the plot twist: COVID-19! Being a newer welder, I was eventually laid off and this gave me the time to finally go through 10 years of unedited photography. To my great surprise, I realized I had enough photography to showcase on a website and I dove head first into editing through the 65k photographs. This project was short-lived as I went back to welding with a local sanitary shop.

The toll that welding takes on my body has pushed me to finally take the leap of faith with initiating a career change. “Weldless, art more!” became my mantra and in July of 2022, this newly founded direction birthed the name Raven Moon Alchemy. The LLC has filed right away and the RMA website evolved into a tangible reality. As a natural multi-creative, I cannot let myself stop by just showcasing photography and graphic arts. RMA is also intended to house my future endeavors, as eclectic as they may be.

As of January 2023, I am preparing to release my first set of photography prints on my website in April, and hopefully a photography book by the end of the year! To be at this point feels like a miracle and I am excited to see where this will all take me. I am also honored to be interviewed by VoyageDenver, only several months after launching my shiny new website! This validation and amazing support from family and friends has been heartwarming and I am forever thankful for it!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has been a very difficult road getting to this point. I have wanted to make a living with my artwork since my teens and it took until my early 30s to convince myself I could. I sustained long-term mental abuse and several counts of sexual abuse, both starting at around age four. My chaotic childhood and anxiety morphed into cPTSD, which was ultimately crippling and prevented me from pursuing my dreams.

Becoming a welder and working in a hard environment that pushes my character helped me realize that I needed to seek EMDR therapy and turn around my internal narrative. Pulling myself out of the deep end and rebuilding my inner core has been the single most difficult thing I have ever attempted! Trying to balance my demanding welding job, therapy, and attempting a career change was starting to become a daunting task.

I cannot count how many times I felt unworthy and wanted to give up before the RMA website was launched. All the support I received from family and friends helped boost my confidence to continue to push and see this all the way through. If I had given up, I would never have had the honor to do this interview!

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I love my daytime grown-up job in sanitary welding, which makes it tough for me to seek a career change and weldless. As a sanitary welder, I specialize in stainless TIG welding for the food industry. Not only do I get to represent women in the trades, but I also get to work at places and on equipment that touches thousands of people a day. I never thought I would be climbing inside large tanks for repairs or welding out piping in the rafters of buildings.

I am extremely proud of this and I am very grateful for the positive support I have received from coworkers. I have been dealt my fair share of sexism on random occasions, and I have learned to combat this by letting the quality of my work speak for itself. I use every project as an opportunity to improve and this level of dedication has set me apart from other welders in this career.

After work hours I continue to work on building RMA and launching my first round of photography prints in the spring. This is a very daunting workload to tackle and I am proud to say that RMA is a completely solo project! All the photography, editing, graphics, marketing, photo printing, and website building were created from the skillsets I have obtained over the years.

RMA is also intended to house more than just my photography and graphic arts. As a multi-creative, it is only natural to expand and I have my sight set on artistic welding and creative videography. Overall I am very proud to have made it this far, pushing past all the obstacles I thought would stop my progress!

Are there any books, apps, podcasts, or blogs that help you do your best?
I have always been someone who consumed mostly music over visual entertainment. Psychedelics grunge, metal, Roma, Tibetan singing bowls, and Viking folk music are my usual go-to’s. When I do need a visual pick-me-up, I gravitate towards the documentary Finding Vivian Maier, Avatar the Last Airbender, and Netflix’s Abstract: The Art Of Design.

Of all the tools that I use for RMA, my cell phone timer is extremely valuable in combating my lovely friend, ADHD. Without that simple app, I would not have a website!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ravenmoonalchemy.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ravenmoonalchemy/
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/_ravnoye_/

Image Credits
@bravetheraine and @layed_out51