“Nothing I do feels like work. It's all things I very much love to do,” smiles Ingrid Aubrey. She is an artist, singer, songwriter and hairstylist from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was adopted out of the foster care system as a toddler and grew up in Winnipeg, but her family is from the Lake Manitoba First Nations. She likes to spend her free time with her two kids, as well as gardening, spending time in nature and daydreaming.

Professionally, Aubrey cuts hair from home and includes energy and releasing work with her haircuts. She also creates intuitive art, which means she creates with no set plan, and she’s in studio recording her debut EP as a singer songwriter. She loves to use social media to share her work and book new work but is judicious with her boundaries to protect her energies.

Ever since Aubrey was a child, she’s loved art and music. Influenced by her banker father, teacher mother and three brothers with traditional career choices, she tried to go to university but realized it wasn’t for her. She gave up her bursary and followed her passion, pursuing hairstyling instead. She first went to hair school at 18 but wasn’t ready and dropped out. At 21, after the birth of her oldest child, she went back and got her high school diploma and went into hairstyling at a trade school.

“I love hair, I've always loved hair, and to get to share that experience with other people, it was just something that I really wanted to do,” Aubrey explains. She learned about people and energy, the way she would be altering their physical experience and working with a sacred part of their being. “It ended up giving me more than I ever could have thought of in the beginning,” she beams.

For those considering going into hairdressing, Aubrey encourages them to remember they are working with whole people and that it is a sensitive and vulnerable place to be, a collaboration. She urges them to consider if they are doing it for the right reasons, to take working with people one on one seriously. She reveals that it involves a lot of personalities and takes a lot of energy.

When it comes to obstacles Aubrey’s faced, she thinks of how over her decade of styling she tried working in prestigious salons, mom and pop shops, mall salons and even Magic Cuts and didn’t find a fit until she was working for herself. As an artist, she struggled with the preconceived ideas of others of who and how she should be and often found herself going against the grain and trusting her own judgement for her life as she gracefully navigated challenges.

As far as inspiration goes, Aubrey looks to emotions, the world around her and global issues and how they impact her. She sees her music as a way to share her inner voice, what delights her and where she would like to see change. At one time she strived to create from a place of happiness and now she takes a different approach. “I realized that the world needs realness and vulnerability, and so I became unafraid, or rather brave, to access deeper parts of me and sort of the darker side of life, and not be afraid to express those,” she reflects, thinking of how this came out in her paintings, music and hairstyling energy work.

To take care of her mental wellbeing, Aubrey grounds herself by connecting with the earth, through self-reflection and journaling. She burns what she expresses in her journal to release those feelings. She exercises, stretches, and connects with her life coach to dive into things that are challenging.

If Aubrey could share a message with her younger self it would be, “Believe in yourself, no matter what, just believe in yourself…. If you don't believe in yourself, it makes the journey a lot more difficult.” After her shaky start being removed from her home and going into foster care, she struggled to find stability, comfort and nurturing despite the many encouraging, loving people she had around her.

Looking to the future, Aubrey hopes to release more art and music, and tour her music on a broader scale. She’s hoping to offer workshops through Connected North and continue hairdressing. She balances her schedule to do her best at what she does and she hopes to continue doing so on a larger scale.

Historically, creative inspiration came to her in lightning-bolt like moments where Aubrey would create what came to her naturally. Since the pandemic, those bursts are fewer and further between so she has had to be more intentional in her creative process, scheduling in time to create and making it a priority, contemplating and writing concepts and pushing herself creatively to find her flow.

In closing, Aubrey urges young people, “Be discerning with with your surroundings, hopefully you can find a safe place and a mentor who supports your dreams and your goals, oing real that not everybody is going to be on your side and just making sure you have a strong community and foundation… and just keep going, pursue your dreams. Nothing is going to be perfect in the sense of how we were told, but there's so much perfection in the journey, despite that. So, just keep going, keep dreaming. Be love.”

Making music, art and styling hair, Ingrid Aubrey makes a creative life and living doing what she loves. After a difficult start in life, she learned to create things of beauty artistically, musically and aesthetically but the most important thing she learned was to believe in herself. Following her lifelong passions of art, music and hair, she left behind the expectations of traditional career and found her place to shine.

Thanks to Alison Tedford Seaweed for authoring this article.