I created this artwork in Amsterdam, sitting a friends house while she and her family were on holidays. I was occupying the main kitchen table with paper and pens and my tablet, listening to ‘women who run with the wolves’ and scrolling through images.

Looking at it now, this artwork captures my deep love for the wild and also my grief. My grief as a woman who feels deeply the loss of the wild inside and outside. The destruction of our environment, the pollution of nature’s resources and extinction of a disastrous amount of animals big and small. Grief about the forceful and systemic taming – or overculturation – of our wild side and the historical opression of our feminine qualities … there is a lot to grief. And a lot to remember. A lot still to lose, and even more to gain.

The feminine qualities are the yin qualities: All relative in nature – because there is no Absolute and thus no absolute black or white, good or bad. Everything exists on an ever changing sliding scale, and relative to – or ‘in relation to’.

Part of these so shamed ‘feminine’ qualities are feelings. How ridiculously outdated and profoundly scandalous is it, to shame the foundation of everything that makes us alive – feelings?

And yet our societies did. Especially they tried to force the soft (strong), emotional (alive), wild (untamed) and intuitive (wise) parts of us human beings into submission. Not discriminating (for once) against gender identification, sex, color, or pedigree… every human being of western societies got robbed of this power called ‘intuition’.

I feel this pain on so many levels, and this is an image trying to reclaim this – to help me remember!  Remember who you are. In stillness and in nature we remember.

 

Size: DIN A4
Black ballpoint pen on acid free paper

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“We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

 

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