When it rains, the slugs come out.

I grew up looking at my shoes as I walked because it’s the only surefire way to avoid trampling on critters. Locals of Vancouver Island know nature like New Yorkers know smog. The beach has never been more than a thirty-minute walk from my house, so it’s easy to forget that some people have never seen the ocean up close.

Amber Fiegen, the artist and creator behind The Hollowbird, has no such difficulties remembering how beautiful British Columbia really is. Originally from Alberta, she continues to be inspired by Vancouver Island.

Upon spotting a banana slug—the largest species found in North America—on a walk to Botanical Beach, Fiegen called her two kids over to take a look. The three of them crowded around this slug with the fervor of meeting a celebrity. Fiegen had grown up with grasshoppers, sometimes worms, and teensy weensy garden slugs, so a banana slug squirming across a trail was thrilling. The locals walking past her didn’t quite share their excitement, even when the three of them waved them over to join the fan club.

“Okay, that wasn’t cool,” Fiegen laughs at herself. “That was just cool for me.”

Her admiration for the beauty in Nanaimo and curiosity for the world around her is a driving force behind her art—and a huge reason why The Hollowbird has become so beloved.

Since 2017, The Hollowbird has offered prints, hand-made trinket dishes, shirts, and plenty more, with most of her work largely centring nature and wildlife. Still, even a versatile and successful brand like The Hollowbird starts small before finding their place in the ecosystem.

 Growing up, Amber Fiegen loved drawing. Her entire family was creative in one way or another; her grandparents were painters, her father was an interior designer, and her mother had a great eye. She and her four siblings were never dissuaded from pursuing creative avenues.

“Three of my siblings are very musical … [My sister] and I both did dance,” Fiegen says. “We were very lucky to grow up in a family where … a very proud point my parents had [was] seeing us succeed in creative spaces.”

Her first market that she attended as a vendor was across the street from where her parents lived. She was 29. The space was one that she was familiar with, and she was surrounded by her local community. Though it wasn’t a huge financial success, she was glad for the opportunity to put herself out there. 

“My kid-dream was to be an artist,” Fiegen says. Even if the market wasn’t her big break, it remained a thrilling experience. Pursuing art has always been a goal, but she set her sights on more ‘realistic’ career aspects.

She created on her own time. It wasn’t business-driven. “I was pregnant, and I was home, and I was on bedrest,” Fiegen says, so she thought to herself, “Well, I’ll start painting.”

She and her husband sanded down some wood slices that they had around the house and retrieved the acrylic paints. Tole painting is a type of folk art with an origin seemingly unknown. The technique is usually attributed to the Welsh town of Pontypool, while the term itself can be traced back to the French term ‘tôle peint.’ In the modern age, it’s widely recognized as acrylics on wood or lacquer on tin, usually on household objects. Fiegen tells me that it was popular in the ’90s, and particularly with mothers everywhere.

I laugh when she pulls out her phone to show me visual examples. I recognize tole painting from my own youth. My mother used to cut out different wood shapes and paint them into Christmas ornaments—we ended up with the duplicates that the craft fairs couldn’t sell.

“Everybody’s mom was into tole painting for a period of time,” Fiegen laughs. “When I started, I could definitely see that influence of what I saw growing up.”

Despite tole painting being a personal venture, it also became her first foray into the professional art world.

“There were a couple of people who were like, oh, I’d like one of those,” she says. “And I was able to sell a couple.”

When Fiegen was living in Airdrie, her best-selling products were wood cut-out paintings of provincial flowers. “They were also my least favourite to make after the first five,” she says. She made hundreds, and each one was meticulously hand-painted.

At the time, she was leaning heavily on what was popular, or what she thought people might like. The Hollowbird—named for her love of bones and what others deem unusual—was still new, and she was still finding her footing. Because she had found popularity in a product that she wasn’t passionate about, it was like these Wild Roses and Dogwoods were boxing her in.

It was a good place to start, but not one where she wanted to stay.

In 2021, Fiegen and her family made the move from Alberta to British Columbia. Although the unit found out that they were moving provinces only two months previously, it had been on their minds a year before doing so. In the lead-up to the big move, Fiegen daydreamed about what she would make once she lived on the island.

“It was all of the nature I had grown up obsessing over. It was people who also loved nature and being outside,” she says. Her youth was spent outside in the dirt, searching for worms in her family’s garden, or trying to name which birds were in her neighbourhood. Her curiosity in the natural world was shared with her family and has been passed on to her children. She loves taking them to parks, watching them climb trees.

“Yeah. Go do weird stuff. Go get a splinter. Go scuff up your knees … I get to experience that with them,” she says with a smile. When she was school-aged, the other kids on her street didn’t share the same fascination.

Navigating the difficult process of growing up sometimes means compromising or burying parts of yourself, trying not to be the odd one out. “Moving here, I felt I got to… reengage that part of myself,” she explains. “I was constantly surrounded by people who were reinforcing all these great loves that I have had since childhood.”

The first time that I met Fiegen was at Nanaimo Pride 2025. She was one of several vendors set up in Maffeo Sutton Park—where we met to chat today—and I was drawn to her stand because of the variety of merchandise, the soothing style, and the abundance of our mutual favourite colour, green.

 Growing up, my mother took my two siblings and I up and down the island in an effort to instill a love of nature. As children, we absolutely did not appreciate being crammed into a car for six hours just to go see more ocean. As adults, we’re taking more walks, picking up outdoor hobbies like paddleboarding, and finally admitting that our mother might have been onto something.

When I was piecing through what of The Hollowbird’s merchandise I wanted to bring home with me, I found a series of zines. The one I brought home was entitled Bitty Baby Book of Moths of British Columbia, but others were centred around things like salamanders or rocks. The three-by-two zines fold out like an accordion. One side showcases Fiegen’s illustrations of different species, along with their familiar names. The other details their scientific name and a fun fact.

Art under The Hollowbird brand has clearly used some resources, either to include fun facts about dallasite, or to clarify the number of petals on a wildflower. My initial assumption was that Fiegen had some academic background in biology, but I learned today that’s not the case.

Fiegen collects vintage nature guides. She searches for current information and questions the information she already possesses. She reads library books or finds research papers online.

“It ends up giving me a lot more information, even just to share with my kids,” Fiegen says. That educational aspect is exciting as a creator as well as to her audience. Although she isn’t a biologist herself, The Hollowbird apparently attracts biologists like moths to a flame.

Seriously, they find her at markets. It’s thrilling, but also terrifying, having an expert look over your work.

“I’m constantly just trying to do them right,” Fiegen jokes. Her tone is light-hearted, but the evidence is clear—in every detailed brushstroke or handwritten letter. She goes on to say, “The more that people know about the outdoor spaces, the more time that they’re going to spend in it—the more care they’re going to put in it.”

Fiegen never attended any formal art classes, either in high school or
post-secondary.

“For a long time, I felt a little resentful and bummed out about the fact that I couldn’t do those things … I think in the long run it served me really well. I think it pushed me,” she says. Without the traditional methods being pressed upon her, she gained more comfort in experimenting. And, she adds with an uproarious laugh, probably an “undue confidence.”

Some approach new projects with trepidation or fear. Not Fiegan.

She rolls up her sleeves and shrugs: I could probably do that.

“I was really pushing to create a product that was sustainable,” Fiegen says. The Hollowbird has improved its shipping process by reusing packaging when possible, prioritizing compostable paper, and minimizing the amount of materials involved.

She started block printing because she wanted to stamp her own packaging. From there, she expanded into more creative avenues, putting ink on fabric rather than cardboard.

Fiegen got her start in ceramics with the help of her friend, Vivian-Sofia Mora (artist and illustrator behind Vivian Sofia Designs). Mora gave her a bag of clay, supplies, underglaze, and lent Fiegen her kiln for that first year.

“Her whole thing was ‘Everyone should try something new,’” she says. With a friend to lean on, Fiegen could brainstorm the plausibility of new ideas or ask for tips and tricks.

Back when Fiegen was still a newcomer on Nanaimo’s art scene, she had braced herself for a competitive sphere, unwelcome and isolating. She found the opposite; peers that she could lean on and support, and who would turn around and do the same for her. “The more artists that we incorporate, the more we build and grow and help to perpetuate support for that,” she says.

Prior to Fiegen’s adventures in pottery, she’d been exploring the realm of digital art. The accessibility of digital art allowed her to practice, while the hands-on physicality of ceramics grew her confidence.

“Pottery became a place where I was able to play with things because my constant goal is to draw the way I wanted to see things drawn as a kid,” Fiegen explains, “I want things to look happy and bright and colourful.”

Ambition seems to be a cornerstone of her personhood. Our conversations winds on, swollen from my curiosity and bursting with Fiegen’s spirit. The variety in The Hollowbird is partially to her own benefit, because she loves it, but it’s also because she wants her work to be accessible.

“[I have] stuff that can be packed up easily and can be transported easily because housing is hard for people right now,” she says. There are larger or more intricate products that have a higher cost, but there are also trinket dishes, stickers, or pins. “Just because your housing isn’t stable doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t get to have nice things.”

Merchandise of The Hollowbird is carried by Warm Gift Shop, Primrose Collective, Caravan Gift Shop, Black Rabbit, and, most recently, Luna Collective. She makes frequent appearances at markets and her website thehollowbird.com is open for orders.

Fiegen makes things she’s passionate about. There’s no shortage of adventure either. The Hollowbird really is the stuff that kid dreams are made of.