WILMINGTON — Mandy Miller didn’t expect to become an artist while attending University of South Florida at Tampa. A journalism major, she began working at an environmental agency out of college, focused on the press relations side of business.
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Though she still works in marketing as director of operations at a local company — with a focus on digital ads — Miller has found herself laser-cutting discarded boxes, engraving resin and doing acrylic pour-painting to help build one-of-a-kind layered artworks in her spare time. Her mixed-media pieces are now on display at the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher in “Ebb & Flow – Anchored in Love, Guided by Gratitude,” on display through July 7.
It’s Miller’s first artist exhibit, centered around sea life and featuring images of jellyfish, a sea turtle, dolphin, seahorse, octopus, whale shark, and even the aquarium’s otter family that relocated recently. Miller donated the latter from the exhibit to the aquarium for a permanent feature, as well an image of an albino alligator, in honor of the center’s most famous resident, Luna. Aquarium spokesperson Deyanira Romo Rossell said they will hang the gifted works permanently in the facility’s marine building.
Miller primarily works in commissions, a business that’s lucrative with dog portrait requests, she said, with four due this week alone. She also has her art hanging in area restaurants, including PinPoint, JohnnyLukes and Bento Box.
The aquarium exhibit came to be when someone from the attraction reached out to Miller via a Wilmington community group on social media earlier this year. The artist had posted her work on the feed of a local Airbnb renter inquiring about unique local art to go into the space; someone from aquarium’s gift shop direct–messaged Miller about her work.
Now around 20 pieces are hanging in the N.C. Aquarium at Fort Fisher’s Spadefish Gallery. Having opened in 2005, it rotates exhibits quarterly and features paintings, photographs, mixed-media and more of area creators.
Rossell said Miller’s unique approach “by upcycling shipping boxes” and featuring marine life aligned with the aquarium’s work toward promoting conservation and sustainability.
It can take up to 20 hours to complete just one piece — at least that was the case with the 15-inch jellyfish art in a display case featured in the exhibit. The 3D pieces consist of layers — some up to 50 — of cardboard, card stock, wood, and resin.
Miller starts the process by creating a vector of the image she is working with to appropriately laser-cut individual layers. She has three lasers in her home, the beams used to cut, engrave, or rasterize various materials.
“The only thing I don’t cut is metal,” Miller said.
Being a champion for sustainable practices, Miller prefers to work with paper card stock and a lot of cardboard. The American Forest and Paper Association indicates a 71% to 76% recycled cardboard rate as of 2023; however, considerable amounts still end up in landfills.
Miller leaned into cardboard out of necessity, really. When she first ordered her lasers, they came in a lot of boxes: “It was so much cardboard and I knew it wouldn’t fit in my recycling bin.”
So she began testing the lasers with what she had on hand. Miller learned quickly cardboard is also highly flammable, noting pockets of glue can be hiding in them, so executing caution has become of the essence. She said she has put out her fair share of small smolders before finding the laser’s right settings.
“I have never had so much curiosity about cardboard in my life,” Miller quipped. “I’ve never looked at recycling day in my neighborhood the same way since.”
Today, 90% of her works are made of upcycled boxes. Miller also scours area restaurants for boxes during wine-delivery or restocking-the-bar days.
Her home has become a de facto art studio. The kitchen table houses resin projects and the front porch runs over with acrylics. The guest bedroom is stacked with cardboard boxes, frames, paper and various canvases of acrylic paint-pours.
“It’s the ‘effed-up pile,’ so to speak,” she said of the canvases.
Miller repurposes discarded works as a background to some of her laser-cut designs. The paint-pouring is how Miller’s foray into the art world began.
A few years ago she was at a party at Pinspiration — a crafting studio franchise in Mayfaire — and learned about the technique. Pouring consists of various cups of different paints dripped onto canvases to create layers.
“You move the paint back and forth and can manipulate it,” she said. “I could barely draw a stick figure but the abstract work came out so great … What was interesting about it is, it’s super-science-y for me because you have to have the right mixture and like each paint has a different density. And you can get really nerdy with it.”
This led Miller to playing around with resin — also used in the background of her laser-cuts to give a shiny, luminescent appearance in some elements, such as droplets of water. She first started utilizing resin for jewelry, made with shark’s teeth. From there, she went further down the crafting rabbit hole and began following professional artists whose works involved laser-cutting.
Self-taught, the laser cut machine allows Miller to engrave certain elements, such as flower or mandala designs in the background or to add in depth to the fin of a sea turtle. Miller said the sea turtle piece hanging the aquarium was more intricate and took a longer time to cut out, but the jellyfish was even longer due to building upon its overall varied components.
“The top layer is made out of acrylic and then with acrylic pieces I cut out, you’ll see the blues and pinks I coat with resin that glows in the dark,” she explained. “That adds a cool component to the underwater creatures.”
Acrylics feature boosts of rich, colored layers, as seen in the dolphin and whale. Acrylic layers also provide a sturdier components to the cardboard, thereby boosting the integrity of the work. Miller hand-glues each layer.
“Every piece of cardboard that is colored is paired with a piece of identically cut card stock because if you’ve ever seen cardboard colored, it’s splotchy and dull,” she said.
The artworks’ wooden frames — some open, others closed-in behind glass or plexiglass — dictate how far Miller will take the embellishment process. She often uses sand from an area beach, sea glass or shells collected throughout the world to speckle throughout a piece. But to stick with sustainability practices, the North Carolina Aquarium — which oversees Fort Fisher, Roanoke and Pine Knoll Shores locations — requested real seashells not be used in Miller’s display. The aquarium advocates for leaving shells in place along beaches, as to protect the natural marine life ecosystem, since species often utilize shells for habitat and shelter.
Miller is donating to to Plastic Ocean Project 10% of proceeds from all sales of aquarium pieces — or from commissions she acquires from the exhibit (QR codes for inquiries are listed beside each piece). She has been working with the nonprofit, which has a focus to keep single-use plastics out of the ocean, and donated works to their silent auctions in the past. Miller also has donated to Freedom Bridge Animal Rescue NC (from where she adopted her own dog), Communities in Schools and Animal Human Alliance.
“I used to be on the board for Communities in Schools,” Miller said, “but I don’t have the time to do it anymore. So the donations make me feel like I’m making an impact.”
The majority of her clients, however, come from unique commissions. It’s grown organically, Miller indicated, with return customers tapping out around 80% after their first purchase.
“It’s usually for gifts,” Miller said, noting one of her more unique items has been laser-cutting the image of a car for someone’s prized collection. “What I really love about the custom pieces I do is, I encourage people to bring me personal mementos — sand from their favorite beach or shells from their honeymoon or something that makes it deeply personal. … It’s really a collaborative process — that’s what brings me so much joy in doing this.”
Miller said she would like to eventually transition into full-time artist — not something she foresaw as a career years ago while attending school. If she made the leap, she said first she would want to learn more about the entire trade of laser-cutting — from creating the images in graphic design software to manipulating images, such as photos she gets of someone’s dog they want to memorialize in her artwork. Currently, Miller works with other artists to help her vectorize initial images as to create each layer that comprises her artwork.
“If I were to take a sabbatical, I would dive deep into that,” Miller said. “But I would love to have the bandwidth to build my own business, since I have been building businesses a lot in town. I worked for a lot of startups, helping grow them, so I see the pathway forward. I think the aquarium may be a tipping point and enough to get me out of the imposter syndrome that every artist struggles with.”
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