I’m a ceramic artist, and I experience synesthesia. I feel color. When I enter a meditative state, color envelops me, and the feelings follow as they float through my being. My meditations haven’t always been this way—they deepened over the past seven years as I healed from a rare cancer. And, actually, just recently, I’ve been feeling color in my wakeful states. The more present I am, the more I sense.
In 2018, I was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer of the pancreas. The cancer had spread to my lymph nodes and liver. I was 37 years old and had three small children at home. My daughter was only a year and a half. I’ve never been through chemotherapy or radiation, but I have been through extensive surgeries, including the Whipple.
Lying in a hospital bed at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City in 2018, I had vision after vision of paddleboarding on clear tropical blue water and making art. I had been working in clay since 2001, at times selling a line of serving ware and others simply as a hobby. But these visions were different. This art was different. I felt that the work was my soul’s calling.
A cancer diagnosis is traumatic. Those words stay with you and alter the mental experience of even having a head cold. I knew I had to heal not only my body, but also rewire my brain from this trauma. I sought a hypnotherapist who came highly recommended, and it was after my work with him that my meditations deeply changed. I had been meditating for nearly 10 years at that point, but what came was vastly different.
The colors I see and feel are healing and convey to me a deep sense of connectivity with the universe. When I dip down into meditation, it’s as though I’m a heavy stone falling to the sand below the water’s surface. The colors are all around me. I’m part of a watercolor painting that’s below the surface. There are different densities of color. They move through my being. Prisms of white light pierce the color veils, and through spiritual journaling, I know this is what I’m to pay attention to and explore.
These ethereal experiences align with my human experience. If the colors are emotions and the white light is divine purity and enlightenment, then, yes, the light can pierce through any emotion of lesser vibration. Emotions are fleeting, and purity remains.
In my art practice, I experiment unendingly. I have hundreds of color tests that I draw upon when planning my work, as I try to replicate portions of the visual color impressions I experience.
I’m not cancer-free today. The cancer is still in my lymph nodes, but I take a monthly hormone injection that’s rendered the cancer inert. The medication was developed to treat a digestive disease, but today it controls my cancer cells.
It’s certainly because of my health challenges and my continued search for healing that I have come to experience color in the way that I do. My visions are a blessing to me—I know I’m meant to share these color experiences with others so that they can witness them as well.
Thanks for following along!
XO
Landis
Expansive Peace, photographed above, comprises seventeen ceramic surfaces glazed as a cohesive wall installation. The work aims to convey the grounding and reassuring meditative color experience that ceramic artist Landis Carey had in the spring of 2025, which fluctuated between lavender, eggplant, periwinkle, and a brilliant, pure white light. The artist experiences synesthesia during her color visions. She feels the color she sees. Her meditation, which inspired Expansive Peace, was one of pure peace and occurred shortly after she and her family experienced a house fire in late February 2025. The color experience was short-lived but is seared in her visual and emotional memory. For more of Landis’s art, follow her on Instagram.