Creative (Im)maturity

Pulling back the curtain on my artistic evolution, reveals a virtual reality, my dreams tattooed on canvas, where I narrate an alternative universe. Where the drama of hidden feelings are laid bare, and you can see beyond the mask, get backstage to the emotion. This serves me as a remedy for life’s tragic pains, comic absurbities. Each stroke of my paint brush aims not just to repair, but to inspire a collective understanding of the human experience. My artistic evolution is a rose of expanding consciousness in a burlesque universe. Exploring space in my more recent work represents a significant evolution in my artistic journey. I visualize a bold new future. The vast expanse of stars, galaxies, and planets, are a backdrop for my imaginary creatures—mutant animals, tiger flies, monsters, and hybrids. Space stands in for an unknown, imminent, and expansive future. It represents a sort of longing, a reaching towards the stars for direction.

I pursue transformation with great interest, love and devotion. Making art helps me visually confront my own inner dualities and embrace the process of self-discovery and integration. My hope is that I am not finished evolving, that I have the potential to become. There is a re-inventing of my story. I am becoming something new. I’m burying my first manifesto, “Cannibal Bonbon”, and I’m exploring my creative (im)maturity. I surrender to the changes. Creation and creativity are a part of this journey. Transformation will transcend my current condition and suffering. I reprogram myself. Because, “every breakdown brings to the fore an immense reservoir of new, untapped differences and mutations,” supportive affirmation by philosopher Steven Shaviro in Posthuman Bodies.¹ Adaption requires encouraging metamorphosis, re-channeling and re-directing energies. I need discipline, abstinence, and to develope new habits. Drawing on alchemic principles such as seperation, decomposition, and union, my art is the laboratory of my future dreaming.

Arrested development can be a motor for artistic vision. As a perennial teenager, I find myself still wrestling with entitlement and rebellion, testing my autonomy, and feeling a deep sense of frustration and insolence. I am performing my own utopia, I enhance my monstrosity, I accelerate the process of my renovation through auditory, visual, or somatic exploration. I’m re-visiting teenage desires, attitudes, tastes and struggles. My vision is one of someone embracing arrested development, where the teenage tiger and goo goo muck beast live on.

’cuz I’m a teenage tiger and a goo goo muck

a goo goo muck tiger and a teenage beast²

I’m drawn to other liminal entities like hybrids, mutants, and monsters that challenge my constructs of reality. I aspire to as Donna Harraway said “crossbreed with other species, creating rich new alliances”³ becoming a tiger goddess, a bird woman, an insect or an indestructible cyborg. I play with the image of the tiger woman, she is fierce, feral, disobedient. By delving into the concept of “becoming animal,” as described by philosopher Gilles Deleuze,⁴ I dive into the fluidity of identity, resistance and separate from them the transformative power of my animal instincts. My paintings explore a bestial nature and primal energy; depicting women learning from tigers, forging their own paths and staging their own revolutions. Among the darker aspects of human-animal similarities, I hint at the harm of domestication and the primal instincts that still lie beneath the surface. I explore the decomposition of independence and vulnerability in my own life and work.

Through my fascination with fauves, I confront my own history of rebellion and defiance against authority. Rejecting conformism and pacification, embracing my delinquent teenage nature, I seek to redefine myself on my own terms and forge my own path forward, into the future. I seek to challenge conventional boundaries and empower myself to conquer my fears and assert my agency. I’m living out these dreams through creating images of my irreverent ideas.

Man eaters on motorbikes

We are the Hellcats nobody likes
Man eaters on motorbikes
We own this road so you better get lost
When you hear the roar of cut-out exhaust
Bug off or you’ll find that you’ve blown your mind

Get off the road!⁵

I have been fractured, my heart and mind, in a desperate struggle. The rational part of my existence versus my emotions and the ensuing trouble with relationships. The two voices in my head are in an internal war. So I created a sculpture where the heart and brain are represented by two female wrestlers. Antagonism begins with an argument in which two people cannot see the other’s point of view. The quarrelling becomes hostile when each fighter defends her position. Rationality uses reason, logic, and facts. Emotions depend on instinct, compassion, and imagination. Nothing is well between them and the duel begins. The altercation seems to have no solution. Maybe we realize that these two wrestlers are very close, like sisters, perhaps even soulmates or twins. But dare we admit to ourselves that it could be two conflicting parts of a fractured self? In dualities, I see the past and the future, good and evil, attraction and repulsion. I also see the interconnectedness of the two sides that at first creates resistance, then eventual revolt, and finally resolution. My heart and mind project combines performance and video, with costumes, sculpture, painting and writing. In my art, I render my fears and intense emotions absurd: women dancing with tigers, the heart and brain wrestling, or ritual sacrifice against colonizers, because “illegitimate offspring are unfaithful to their origin.” (Harraway)⁶

Representations of decapitation in my paintings is the severing the rational part of the mind, giving hierarchy to the intuition (the domain of feminity). I’ll need a prosthetic brain, after I’ve cut the old one off. Perhaps, I will graph a tiger head in place of mine. Or through meditation, I will attempt to purify my mind to reprogram the wetware. Because my mind is a wild rebellious teenager that needs to be directed, structured, guided or could run amok, delinquent, unattended, unsupervised.

I want my praxis to be like a volcano—explosive, powerful, erupting, burning hot, and oozing.

I’ve been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too!
The things I did to them baby, I can do to you!

‘Cause I’m a Fujiyama Mama and I’m just about to blow my top!
Fujiyama-Mama, Fujiyama!
And when I start erupting, there ain’t nobody gonna make me stop!⁷

I study insects. Amidst the beauty of my art lies an undercurrent of obsession and anxiety. The insects that devour and multiply, are reflections of the conflicted desires that permeate my existence. So, I incarnate the bee, making my own medicine and propolis, a fuzzy baby bee. The teenager self is a cockroach, dressed in black, surviving the apocalypse, her armor on the outside, creating art to make the patriarchy squirm.⁸ This hard outer shell belies my inner vulnerability and growth, “embodying a pre-historic, pre-symbolic, ecstatic, primal, and divine matter” (Camillo Penna).⁹ I wish to become a humanoid hybrid, mnemonically embracing these ideas and anxieties, interacting with my ‘inner menagerie’. The childlike part of me, traumatized and needing rerouting, cultivates insect characteristics—adaptable, resilient.

Well I’m a human fly
I spell F-L-Y
I say “buzz buzz buzz”
And it’s just becuz
I’m a human fly
And I don’t know why
I got 96 tears and 96 eyes

I got a garbage brain

‘Cuz I’m a reborn maggot using germ warfare¹⁰

I hope that my art will be a transgenic retro virus that will assist other humans mutate into what Barbara Creed referred to as “monsters whose bodies signify a collapse of the boundaries between human and animal”.¹¹ Monsterous because I resist being controlled and oppressed; I welcome changes in form, stylizing and enhancing them through sensory exploration. As a true rebel, I embrace, as Donna Haraway described in 1992: “The potential monsters have for creating embodied and ever ambiguous sites for displacing and transforming actions on many levels.”¹² A new abject creature emerges as I integrate (im)mature aspects of myself into a well-functioning unified whole, transcending traumatism and narcissism. These hybrid creatures that I create will in turn help to unleash the sleeping beast in the viewer.

Studying Transhumanism and Nomadic Theory transforms hurt, humiliation, and oppression into a creative force, by embracing an unfixed, “discontinuous identity” (Harraway)¹³. Of course, exploration and variety are essential, while questioning my programming. Figuring this fractured self out involves adapting, choosing the right battles, right portals and right staircases to reach the next power dimension. Becoming animal frees me from the constraints of civilization. Elastic, kneaded, stretched, and twisted, I perform to explore and understand myself, challenging my conditioning and choosing which is the good fight. Surrounded and immersed in evolving territories, I strive to stop fighting with myself. I challenge my perception of self, understanding that life is a complicated mystery—a puzzle to solve through rational thought, feelings and imagination. There is a conciliation, a union, my heart and mind become allies. Art is the vehicle to this process.

By mutating the maps of my mind, I’m “building new collectives and borderlands inhabited by human and non-human entities”,¹⁴ using technology to improve myself. Inspired by the Cyborg Manifesto, a cyborg, can “blur categorical distinctions (human/machine, nature/culture, male/female)”, (Braidotti 2011)¹⁵ embracing the wilful sculpting and crafting of self. I aim to empower the marginalized, destroy normality, and protect the wild and untamed.

Articulating my journey through colors, vibrations, and non-verbal cues, in my emancipation, my aim for my art is a non-rational, comunication, beyond words, by images, impressions, sounds, and feelings. This connection making will extend to all the work I’ve done or will do, hopefully converging in a graphic novel or film where stories meet and converge. Art is my method of exploring what drives me—freedom, learning, and continual evolution. My work, a rocambolesque tale with strange, colorful characters, communicates through colors, vibrations, and pheromones, bypassing what Burroughs referred to as “infected language”.¹⁶

Teenage rebellion and transgression are my ways of re-coding my data processing machine. Deviance is for me a performative space of contradiction, where I use my interior combats as a well of inspiration and ideas. By embracing my arrested development and exploring my creative (im)maturity, I speak of my potential for mutation and transformation. No longer satisfied making two dimensional work, now I feel compelled to connect the dots, flesh it out, push the forms further, with writing, video, and sculpture, to get one step closer to making it come alive, bringing my art into the 3rd dimension. I must imagine anew. If I bring my creations to life, I bring them into the future, where my potentiality lies. By listening to and heeding the muse I am rewarded by the Gods. I create art that challenges and inspires, conveying a hope for tomorrow. I constantly feed on, incorporate, and transform my environment. I become; therefore, I will have been. This process of growth and transformation is ongoing and never complete. It is not done yet.