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.