THE TRIGGER
FOR TRANSFORMATION

This piece explores the psychic terrain before birth: a liminal space where ancestral memory, biology, and unconscious projections converge to shape a self not yet fully formed. It draws a bit from Jungian motifs of the Self, myths of our collective shadow, and the threshold of incarnation where I believe identity is imagined (but not yet fully owned). I was drawn to the question of how we begin, not just biologically, but also spiritually n politically. What haunts the womb? What is carried in before the first breath?A red dragon emerges as mythic guardian and threat - the fire of lineage and the weight of legacy. It hovers near the fetus like a question of protection or domination, echoing the collective shadow we inherit before we understand it. The brain floats overhead, the first architecture of awareness. The vessels drift like root systems, already reaching and binding.Beneath it all lies a silhouette. Gray and collapsed... as if gestation rests on the bones of something lost or unresolved. Roads cut across the background, etched into water and earth, suggesting destinies prewritten and maybe paths waiting.For me, this collage interrogates the myth of a neutral beginning. The fetus does not enter a blank slate but is written upon by fire, myth, biology, the psyche of the mother, and the shape of the world. The roads are laid before the first cry. Creation here is not serene. It's contested. The question I kept thinking about was who gets to script the myth of our becoming?

In this piece, a fingerprint spans the backdrop—an undeniable marker of identity, yet impersonal in its repetition. Death on horseback storms across the sky, signaling that she is not merely an end, but a force shaping the beginning. Her presence felt necessary. She’s a reminder that what we inherit often comes cloaked in silence and plenty of times justified as tradition.Below, a mother and child look skyward into an omen. What they see challenges them to find a better path forward. Because beneath their gaze, the ground is littered with dismembered dolls — severed heads with stitched faces, vacant eyes, and artificial flowers blooming from wounds. They represent the cultural baseline for children: subservient, decorative, voiceless, targets. These heads aren’t relics of violence. They’re the current templates. They’re the baseline.As I assembled these elements, I realized what the mother and child were seeing. They weren’t just witnesses. They were recipients of a legacy. But something in their posture resisted. They saw what the world offers as a guideline and decided not to comply. This is where the piece turns. That gaze upward became an act of refusal.Children don’t arrive untouched. They’re born into frameworks shaped by fear, control, and inherited systems of power. The myth of innocence often hides the fact that childhood is where society rehearses its violence - through indoctrination, obedience, and self-erasure.The ancestral contract may be written in silence and repetition, but here, I wanted to capture a crack in that spell — the moment when recognition becomes resistance.

This piece explores how life’s earliest moments are marked not only by hope but by inherited power struggles and the subtle violence of prescribed existence. In this tableau, I showcase the uterus, shadowed and isolated, standing as a silent testament to the political structures shaping bodies and futures.Innocence is showcased as both fragile and burdened as we witness the detachment and disregard of children. Here, one of them glows like a small sun, even as their arm dangles in someone else’s grasp like a question of worth.Beneath a yellow heaven and the illusion of peace, a severed body drifts upside down suspended between flight and drowning; limbs unanchored, histories reversed. This was a dream of memory, power, restrained gestures, n the uneasy (sometimes violent) handoffs in life.Nothing is still, and yet no one escapes. Confrontation is the only way.

I began with the pregnant figure reaching toward the moon - a symbol of possibility, rhythm, and the hidden interior life. She’s birthing both the future and the past: the expectations, wisdom, conflict, and resilience encoded in the feminine body across generations.The surrounding world is unstable (mutable? fluid?): figures dangle, vision is inverted, and time doesn’t march forward so much as press on. The old couple below doesn’t mourn. They just hold on and on and endure. They embody what happens when we deny ourselves the right to transform.Above, a woman hangs upside down, her precarious position disrupting expectations of agency and control. Like The Tower in Tarot, collapse is not the end; it’s just the violent clearing of illusion. What falls reveals what was false, and in the wreckage, truth begins to rise.For me, this piece is about cycles disrupted and about what happens when we are denied the space to become ourselves. It's also a reminder that while the feminine body is constructed, politicized, and contorted, it's also fiercely capable of intuitive change.Amidst it all, a hand reaches. The gesture is quiet, but defiant. It’s a secure reclamation. The feminine here isn’t passive at all. It’s political, mythic, and metamorphic. And it insists on becoming. Now.