SIDNEY -- Geraldine presses a button on her portable stereo and Presley starts playing. "I love Elvis!", she proclaims with a big smile, before revealing she listens to his music every day.

There's also a corner of the room filled from floor to ceiling with King collectables. Geraldine says she wasn't really an Elvis fan until he suddenly started showing up her dreams.

"It was wonderful," she says. "He showed me his personality!"

Elvis seemed so nice in her dreams that Geraldine felt inspired to create a larger than life-size painting of Presley wearing one of his bejewelled jumpsuits. "I glued all the bling-blings on it!" Geraldine laughs, pointing to a couple of gold chains hanging off of the image.

Then, Geraldine's life was 'all shook up' when she suffered a debilitating medical condition that surgery couldn't fix. She shows me an x-ray of what happened. "This is my esophagus and this is my stomach," she says pointing to how they aren't attached.

"I could die every day."

After the initial diagnosis, Geraldine says her career was cut short and she wrote a poem describing how she felt like an 'eagle who's wings had been snapped'. 

"You worry for a little bit," she says. "But too much worry drives you into a negative space."

So Geraldine went searching for something positive at a nearby beach and discovered something glittering in the sand. 

"Oh! I need this!" she recalls thinking at the time. "[I need] to do something"

She returned home and started transforming the multi-coloured sea glass into sculptures. Now, her garage is like a gallery, filled with displays of her work.

"I'm sort of addicted to it now! It's terrible," Geraldine says. "I don't want to do it. It's really hard."

Yet, Geraldine says she is compelled to glue and paint all the intricate pieces together ⁠— while singing along to Elvis songs.

"He inspires me!" the 80-year-old says while painting the edge of some glass and shaking her hips to the music. "[He] inspires me to just be yourself!"

Elvis has inspired her to transform the glass into galloping horses and broken pottery into roaring dragons. There's also a large sculpture of a bald eagle preparing to fly. It seems that making art has also allowed Geraldine's once broken spirit to unfurl its wings again.

"It just relieves everything!" she laughs.

Which is how the King of Rock 'n' Roll inspired Geraldine to become the Queen of Beach Glass Art.