Naudline Pierre (Haitian-American, 1989) - I, A Terror Loosed Upon Your Heels (2020)

subversive fashion>>

i either need to be fully covered in hair head to toe, pits, bush, everything or just completely bare. none of this prickly legs and ingrown hair bullshit. i either want to be completely soft with fluffy, gorgeous body hair or have soft, smooth, hairless skin. is this too much to ask for? is it?

“Queer dharma, or that Buddhist dharma as experienced by queer and trans people, challenges every one of these heteronormative codes. Even the notion that you are a gay man, or a lesbian, a trans man or trans woman, is challenged by both dharma and transqueer experience. Your female partner that you thought was a woman is now transitioning becoming a trans man; the gay man you are dating also performs as a drag queen and goes about as a woman in certain social contexts. Nothing is fixed or permanent; nothing can be pinned down for long; everything is impermanent; everything changes. This experience of profound impermanence is common to queer and trans people. It is the pattern of our lives; it is our lived experience. And it is one of the gifts that we have to share with the greater sangha. We know, perhaps more profoundly than heterosexuals, that there is no fixed “self,” that all facets of identity are ascribed, learned, performed, negotiated, discarded, transformed, and mutable.” - Shaun Bartone in Transcending: Trans Buddhist Voices

My painting, "Cat in Boat Pose."

Oleksandr Murashko (Ukrainian, 1875-1919)

Carousel, 1906

Edwin Long (British, 1829-1891)

Queen Esther, 1878

moon

The Seven Steps of the Red Goddess, for Chaosium's The Lunar Way

This set of pieces is some of my favourite work I've ever done (and there is a bunch more of that in the book). I had a larger format to work with than previous depictions of the Seven Steps really tried to emphasize the more human aspects of the Red Goddess - depicting her as expressive and reactive to her situation, someone that you can see yourself in. I put a lot of myself into it (and we all know that her underworld quest is an allegory for transition) and am very happy with how it turned out!