Stripping in the Wilderness

Tattoo flash by Danish artist W. Christiansen, 1897

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.