The Minotaur is a creature born from a king’s hoarding greed and a mother’s cursed lust, used as a weapon to (quite literally) cow foreign powers. This led me to consider the ways we suffer for our ancestors’ mistakes and false beliefs, how inherited shame manifests in self-betrayal. I hand-crafted both the mask and the labrys in this self-portrait series, a meditation on natural beauty turned self-destructive.

Self-portraits.

Self-portraits.

Self-portraits.

October 2023 and all the Pomegranate fruits are dead. By dead, I mean eaten; devoured by a creature, perhaps bird, perhaps squirrel, perhaps Persephone herself. They hung on the tree, hollow and rotting. I picked them all — as if they’d been ripe — and peered into the basket. It seemed fitting that the tree — which every year, for the past five years, has been burgeoning without incident — had been consumed. The fruits offering sustenance to something or someone else. Not me. Not…us.

There are stories inside of us: secrets and desires and memories and fantasies piled up and up and up and up. All of them mirrors — all sizes, shapes, designs.

I am in between — wandering a threshold — ghosting through fields of Asphodel — wondering how in the Hades I ended up here.

I love being watched. Should I feel embarrassed?

It all began when I was living in Springfield — a city in southwest Missouri, USA. I was working as a cook in a health food store when one of my coworkers told me about a dance studio that she'd visited…

Whether it was for food, for sex, or for comfort, hunger was something I was taught to fear and to keep under control…

You could argue that pole dancing is just another aspect of our ascension culture: always climbing, reaching, going up up up. But pole is also a descending art — it beckons us inward and down, into the sensual and primal sensations of the body…

We live in a culture obsessed with ascension. We are rising, striving, climbing, trying so hard to go up up up…