Returning

Medium Description

watercolor and ink on watercolor board.

Artist Description

Returning features a partial bust of a female-bodied form , with various aspects of the body featuring mechanical robot-like parts, as well as fleshy, eldritch creature like appendages. The imagery in this piece serves as a representation of the discomfort and, at times, otherworldly distance that I have felt in my relationship to my body as an assigned female at birth (AFAB) transmasculine person. Having naturally birthed and fed two children with my body (thereby utilizing its so-called ‘biologic purpose’) and then not realizing my own transness until my 30s (which also allowed me to finally get at the root cause of my lifetime of body dysmorphia and many years of disordered eating off and on) has meant that the extremes of love and hate that my relationship with my body has consisted of are vast and incredibly overwhelming at times. It also was influenced by the grotesque and unsettling emergence of AI generated ‘creative’ works over the past few years. As a lifelong artist and a transgender person, the past few years have felt like a particularly grueling marathon of constant yelling and debating over various aspects of my existence and personhood, from people demeaning my creative works as being a waste of time, to people insisting that my own identity isn’t real, or even that I should lose my children or be put to death. 

Needless to say, feeling at home in my body and my self has not been easy.

Feeling foreign and unwelcome in your own body is a special kind of hell that I feel so few people deserve to experience (I do have a list of those who I would gift it to in the snap of my fingers if I could, because sadly we live in a time when empathy is seen as weakness and is apparently only a possibility when someone is personally vested in the cause, which is, of course, not actually empathy at all, but I digress), and trying to capture that experience in ways that might connect in the minds of those who haven’t personally experienced it is a challenge, but I feel it is a challenge worth accepting and attempting. Art, no matter what the latest tech company might insist, is an inherently human experience, and true experiences can never be truly made by a bunch of ones and zeroes. My own conflict with my body may have me feeling, at times in my life, like a machine simply going through the motions of its design, but even on those days, that pain and distance I feel, as hard as they can be to cope with, is my humanity reminding me my own life is my greatest art piece, and that it is for me to create for myself, to create my own self out of the hues and colors of my own life experiences, to find the places within myself where I feel most a home, and work to cultivate that every day. 

Returning is about just that: Making the choice, every day, sometimes even moment to moment, to return to your core self, to the you under all the fears and influences of outside voices and opinions, and to find that sense of home and hope within.