Mixed media on canvas.
61 x 92cm

Psilocybin and solitude. I was lying in bed and there’s a mirror next to my bed and I saw myself there and I saw that I was crying and my heart broke in the best way and I remembered that I’m beautiful because most of the time, I forget. I remembered a day over four years ago where I noticed the same thing and how on that day, I vowed to no longer be an enemy to myself but remaining awake and open takes practice and so for much of the time, I can still fall into the trance of self-loathing.

And feeling love for myself, I wondered why I hadn’t been painting lately and I realised I was deeply and completely trapped by the hoardes of voices criticising me from inside my skull. But recently I had been learning about ADHD, something I only just discovered that I have. “ADHD is an interest based nervous system” I read and what this means, at least for me, is that it’s really easy to do the things that I want to do and everything else feels a little like dragging a heavy corpse up the side of a mountain. In a hailstorm. While a chorus of people are screaming at you. Essentially, I’m an adult woman with the nervous system of a toddler.

I realised that the key to getting myself painting in my studio might be as simple as letting myself do whatever the fuck I goddamn want while I’m in there. And so I walked into my studio, put a canvas on an easel and closed my eyes. “What do I want to do today?” I asked. It turned out that what I really wanted to do was get fucked. Fucked in that frenetic, grabbing, gripping way that he does where I feel my flesh as clay and soft fruit being dug and pushed into while he growls sexy insults into my ear.

So I started to paint and while I painted, I spoke out loud. I was telling certain male teachers at art school to fuck off, that their feedback wasn’t helpful. “It’s my fucking studio, I’ll do what I fucking want.” As I painted, I danced around the canvas to Hip Hop music with the sort of heavy beats that vibrate through my body in just the right sort of way. I thought about what good sex is, how it’s an energetic exchange, a response to what is happening in the moment instead of trying to force things into what you think they should be. I started to talk to the body forming before me which was my body with his hands on it. I spoke his words.

Dumb bitch. Stupid cunt. Take it, slut. You fucking love it, you greedy fucking whore.

The painting was looking amazing and I thought of all the teachers who would tell me that I should stop there, that I tended to always take my paintings too far, do too much, “less is more” they would say “give the eyes somewhere to rest.” But I was having the best time and I wanted to keep fucking the canvas awhile yet and besides, I kind of felt like the obsession with practicing restrain in art might be related to some sort of racist, sexist, cultural supremacist, colonial shit that wants to be separate from colours and emotions and nature and everything that is wild and different and cannot be controlled.

“I’m done when I say I’m done.” I said. “My fucking art, my fucking rules.”