In creating imagery and digital art based on life, death and greenery
In creating imagery and digital art based on life, death and greenery, I hope to give new life to the things we don’t speak of, the things that religion, which shares close ties to the patriarchy, has deemed unspeakable, immoral - blasphemous, while highlighting what is true and real - this planet that supports life, the earth we will all one day become part of.
While I’ve never been dead, I have been alive and have felt the ways in which the things that bring us discomfort are swept under the rug. Sitting close with death, sexuality and power in those society has deemed to be inferior will show us our uneasiness comes from no bad place - it is only fear and anxieties instilled in us so that we may be silenced. The forces that work to keep us quiet profit from us staying that way.
The impetus for my Deals with the Devil zine and was a particularly mediocre day that teetered on sending me over the edge - the sameness of it to the day before, the dullness that seeped in like something rotten and the feeling that the day after would be much the same.
The finality of death made me think that instead I might like to be possessed - and then I was, by something that grabbed hold, animated me with purpose and whispered to me visions of creation. There doesn’t seem much more to living than making something of meaning before you go on to nourish the soil and support new life to come.
In my mind, living and dying take a cyclical shape, with nature interwoven into its fabrics, it is the thread that holds the seams of being and being-no-more together. My illustrations and digital art works to make meaning of this “oneness” and idea that we are all nature, whether breathing air into it or stretching out and making roots when we are buried within it.
You will also see that my zine and other digital art wrestles with loneliness, insecurities and anger. None of us know a life without these shadows, but I’ve found shining light into the crevices in which they hide allows me and these feelings to come to an agreement and create something we both like in the end.
Keywords: Illustrator, Graphic designer, Digital art, Adobe illustrator, Zine, Graphic artist, Digital drawing, Illustration design, Graphic illustration, Digital artwork, Illustrator art, Environmental graphic design, Green burial, Gardening, Ecofeminism