Vanity Follows Form

brothers, not enemies

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I’ve been playing around with pour paintings. Some of these are already spoken for, but if you want to purchase one just ask!

The first one weirdly reminds me of Hyman Bloom but uh, don’t google that unless you like stunning oil paintings of cadavers.

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For Christmas a few years ago one of my friends asked me to make them something, so I dusted off this poem I’ve always been fond of and made a bit of paper art around it. It’s the first time I’d done something like this, but I think it would be nice to try more. 

Sink my nails into the flesh and pull, split open the sun and find inside the glory of– oh—it’s just more sun.

There’s no promise to be found in metaphor anymore, not when grove branches are heavy with suns, forgotten on their boughs for too long, splitting themselves open as offerings, overfull with light and sweetness.

You reach up to pluck one, I reach down to pull a fallen one out of ankle high grass, and you don’t trust it, you tell me, because it hasn’t been able to glut itself for days. How can I be satisfied with rumination?

Or only a memory of what it felt like to collect our light from the source? So I split it open to prove you wrong, so we compare our odd improbabilities, until we both have light dripping down our chins,

stickying our fingers, and maybe this is the time you’ll touch me with honeyed hands —that I’ll carry traces of your sugar home when I cannot carry you— sink my nails into the flesh and pull.

Growing Wild (2019)

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A second commission of the bunch!

The person who commissioned this one requested "the weirdest birds" and also "weird architecture". I think I managed to work both in.

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All That’s Left To Escape The Jar (2022)

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KEEP WORKING (2022)

It is here! The first commission of the bunch! I started this during a hang out call a little bit ago while I was thinking about *gestures at everything*. I’d just, rather be worried about the people instead of the economy, you know?

This one goes out to @imthelobster, who has been incredibly supportive and who I’m SO EXCITED TO LIVE NEAR AGAIN, SOON.

There are ten commission slots left! Check out the details here!

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Downpour (mixed media, 2021)

My therapist and I are working on melding the younger version of myself with the current version of myself to help us both heal from some trauma that is still hanging around and making my life difficult. (Why can’t I just be over it??? I ask exasperated. That was like, 22 years ago! Spoilers: that’s not how trauma works.)

She gave me a list of questions to answer so we could go over them and the one I’m having the hardest time with is ‘Do I owe the younger version of myself an amends?’ Why would I owe them an amends?? I sputter. I’m not the one who [redacted] and made them and me feel worthless and unstable and angry and alone!! I’m still working on it, but I suspect it has something to do with the lack of grace I give myself, even over situations and people I can’t control. If I was just stronger or more capable or less naive. If I hadn’t been afraid of my own voice. If I had developed an understanding of the future that could predict these outcomes. Maybe then I’d be safe still. Maybe then I’d be able to accept love.

Anyway, life is a long journey. Hopefully I’ll be on it for a good while yet. Hopefully, sooner rather than later, I’ll learn to connect.

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Good afternoon! I am here to tell you that through a series of events your favorite oversharer got some collages published in a lit mag! It’s Wrongdoing Magazine’s inaugural issue and you can download a copy to read on their site. I had three collages published in all alongside some other really cool art and many, many pieces of fiction and poetry. I really feel like everyone will find something to like in there.

Additionally, I want to thank @dianahurlburt for bringing me to their attention. My collages, unlike my writing, are only ever made with myself in mind. I make them because there are some things I can’t find words for, because sometimes I’m itchy and I don’t know why, because change is both hard and inevitable and I need to give myself the space to accept that. I do share them, but I never really expect anyone else to truly enjoy them, and the idea that people do makes me a little verklempt.

Thanks to anyone who has ever looked at these small pieces of my heart and said ‘yeah, that’s nice.’ It’s hard to believe that I’m capable of capturing that sometimes, as the one person who knows all the dark and complicated parts of myself. But then, I guess everyone else has those craggy interiors too and sometimes it’s just nice for someone to put a cloud on it and let it go.

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After Lilith (Kiki Smith, 1994) (2020)

The night I turned to stone I was alone in the dark, asleep. I didn’t realize it was happening until my lungs had frozen over, not that there was anyone to call for.

It was the next evening before a friend said ‘I haven’t seen her online, does anyone know where she is?’ And when they finally got around to breaking into my apartment I had been in bed for a week, quietly cataloguing the things I already missed: poetry, dark chocolate truffles, laughing, my breath.

They had to cut my comforter away, because it was tucked so slightly between my elbow and my chest they couldn’t tug it free. They wouldn’t take it with them, wouldn’t leave evidence of possible comfort. It might give other people the wrong idea.

They didn’t know where to put me, so for a few days I sat in a hospital morgue to wait for an expert to come and verify the still warm hardness of me. They clipped out a small part of my heel and determined that, even though I was radiating the warmth from thirty years of collecting the sun, I was now entirely marble, not a trace of human left, if there ever had been any, how were they to tell? I could merely be the work of a talented man, one who had studied me, could finely replicate the lines in my palms and the worry in my lips, who had traded his sweat for my blood, always my blood in conclusion, not my flesh, because it was obvious by the look of me that I had more of that than any right thinking man could covet.

They did not want to keep me. They did not want to keep thinking about me, but they could not get the swelling curve of me out of their heads. Neither could the newscasters. Neither could the people who listen to the news. So they wrapped me in blankets, put me in a truck, and took me to the antiques market where I had once purchased a set of red 1950s luggage that I wanted to carry around the world. The tag they taped to my shoulder bore a price that could have taken me almost all of the way around the world if I was being frugal.

People came to stroke the smooth, veined stone of my stomach and breasts and thighs. It had been so long since someone touched me gently that I wanted to weep with the fear and pain of it, but I couldn’t.

Word of me got around. A collector picked me up for a steal with a box of records and an old cat-shaped lamp thrown in to sweeten the deal. I was wrapped in another blanket—they were more careful this time, because I now belonged to someone not myself—and I was loaded into another truck to be moved to a new place of rest.

I was unwrapped in a garden and left reclining in the grass near the edge of a pond. For a while my world was largely green and gold then black and grey then green and gold again. The sunlight traced a dappled path across my face and ran its fingers down my back as afternoon sank to evening. Sometimes on cool mornings the collector would sit on me while he was thinking and collect my warmth, but for the most part I was left alone with the softly humming trees and flowers.

I could have been happy if they’d left me there forever. Even after the man stopped coming to perch in the thick arch of my waist. But men die and gardens change hands and so did I.

This time to a museum where they placed me in a crate in a back room and left me in the dark. Where I waited and waited and waited, and taught myself to weep. Where my tears started to rot away the wood beneath my stretched out side. Where after I’d run out of numbers for days there was suddenly a light, and a man that ran his hand down the length of my right arm and sighed, and pulled away the wooden sides of my crate until I was naked again.

But even after the man went home for the evening I was not alone. There, across from me, was another naked woman, kneeling. She was dark as the night with pond blue glass eyes. Her mouth was set in a determined line, her palms were less fine. And I knew in that moment that I was not the only person trapped in the world, looking out through impossible eyes.

I longed to touch the roughness of her beaten metal skin, and I knew that if I did she would feel soft under my hands, worn that way by peering eyes the way a river wears away a stone. The way the rain of the garden wore away at me.

They have mounted us in the open, fifty feet apart: she on the wall seven feet up, I on a dais in the middle of the floor. My plaque talks about my warmth, but not my life. My artist is listed as unknown. People are no longer allowed to touch me, but they stare so intently that I can almost feel it. The context of the two of us together saves me from being an oddity, turns me into something precious, something worthy of being understood.

To think, that when all of this started I wanted nothing more than to have my flesh back, to reach out and affect the world. I still want nothing more than to have my flesh back, but only so I can touch the other sculpture’s face with less exquisite hands.

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When I started making this I didn’t mean for it to encapsulate my whole floral bisexuals in space aesthetic, but who am I to fight the muse?

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I am afraid there is no bottom to this fear.

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I asked some friends for collage prompts. This is for the prompt ‘yellow’. It’s a bit different from what I usually do. Generally I try to build an atmosphere or world. This one’s more disjoined and, of course, there are words. They’re a whole-ass mood, tbh. I don’t hate it. I might do more similar things in the future.

Still, Kill! This tug-of-war between use and preservation. Why? Life.

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I’ve spent the last several days incredibly anxious, thinking about absences and graphs and wondering how long it will be before the absences we’re soon to face ripple through more people I love. In the past when friends have died I’ve felt their empty space in the world as brilliantly and sharply as I ever felt their presence. How many absences does a person have to touch before a chorus becomes a cacophony? How many degrees out does it hurt? How much of a privilege it is that I am only now on the verge of finding out.

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Question: What would you do differently if you were brave?

Answer: I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss her. I would kiss-

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You know, I have spent the last fifteen years trying to figure out how to tattoo the My Chemical Romance lyric ’well they’re never gonna get me, like a bullet through a flock of doves’ onto my person and I think that finally I may have just landed on it. I’ll have the artist even out my clumsy inconsistencies of course, if it ever comes to it.

On your mother’s eyes say a prayer, say a prayer.

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I have been Going Through It this week, so instead of giving up on everything I finished Black Sails and made some art. As an offering to the universe it’s not much, but it’s the best I could do. Perhaps tomorrow I will be capable of more.

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Behold! An art!

I have finally sent this collage to the person who commissioned it, so now I feel like I can share it here. The commissioner of this piece sent me off to listen to the Lucy Dacus album Night Shift and guided me toward a couple of songs. The one I glommed onto was “Yours & Mine”, which contains the lines me and mine, we’ve got a long way to go, before we get home, ‘cause this ain’t my home anymore and somebody lit the store on fire, somebody lit the house on fire, somebody lit the crowd on fire.

In the collage the character of the song is looking on, safe and adorned on the outside, as the house she was told to stay in goes up in flames. The person who did the lighting is stuck in them, bound to the place by their desire to control it.

I really enjoyed making this and my goal is to get back to making more art this year. Perhaps even as many as one a month! We’ll see where life takes me.

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At every wingspan’s depression you’ll think this was a mistake, think this lonely fall is all you know, think, what’s the point of loving the sky if it won’t hold you

It won’t hold you, but step off, heart, follow your purpose, there is no shame in doing what you were made to do.