Some things you cant touch, see or grab. But they are there. Always and everywhere. Silently invading every part of you, your everyday life and the things in it. The less you speak of it the more you have it. The more you have it the less you want and can address it. Shame is not logic, it is not the brain reacting, hardly our conscience, it's the body. It is truly and fully a physical feeling.

For the first time I give myself permission to dig into all of these materials, I indulge in the styles and tastes that I've long felt forbidden for me. I wont be limited in my choices of symbols, coloration or aesthetics in ways that good taste and patriarchal structures have taught me to be. I am letting that guard down and diving in, using it in advantage for my work and my theme. I feast on fake pearls, glitter, shells and plastics. I turn towards what is considered shameful or bad taste and work with it, embrace it and elevate it. Not to show that is the new "right" but to justify for all of the times that I have turned away from it because of shame.

To be a person with feelings of shame is to be a person that automatically will try to turn from itself. Shame is intimately entwined with femininity, it is silently inherited from generation to generation. It is experienced only by some bodies and not others. It is not being able to see your own value. It is the loneliest feeling in the world, but really a marker for something much bigger and deeper than one individual.

It is materialized everywhere around us.

It is not me, but it is not not me.