here's the first piece, inspired by that cathartic scene in I Saw the TV Glow (if you're trans or a furry, or unsure about either of those, you must watch it).
if you saw what was inside of you, in your perception a ridiculous and unexplainable and forbidden version of yourself--would you allow it to breathe? would you take it seriously?
lobsters live for a ridiculously long time in the wild (average 45-50 years). they molt their exoskeletons several times throughout their lives and the process is extremely physically demanding, in fact, it is the most common way for a lobster to die. imagine physically trying to turn yourself inside out and exposing your fleshy, soft and vulnerable insides at the bottom of the ocean. a lot of times they lose their claws during this process, abandoning the part of their body meant to protect them, obeying the natural mechanisms to allow a rebirth and transformation.
people don't take furry art seriously. it's cringe, it's bad, it's unserious. it exists to be mocked & laughed at. with my pieces i am forcing them to take it seriously. i don't leave room for these lobsters to be perceived as a joke. lobsters are a fundamentally un-furry animal, they are insect-like and aren't cute or cool, and that is precisely why i chose them--i wanted to approach them as an outsider, and understand how it is that i've come to grow so attached to an animal that, before this project, i at best thought of as, well, a joke.
being misunderstood is such a deep fear i have. my identity as a furry artist is so commonly treated as an unfortunate choice i made, something that hides my artistic knowledge. a misplaced joke spoken out of turn in a conversation, i'm the kid at the adult table of "real artists." but if i can grab those people, and make them see it as valuable, see that they're allowed to enjoy this and view themselves as something "uncool", something not normal, something closer to what is really inside of them- that's all i want. furry artists are doing something so big and impossibly beautiful that i can't let it go unseen.
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
areudirty
