BAKERY OF VENUS

So maybe you’re dreaming of a better world. You want to change your mind. Your self-schema just isn’t cutting it. Where does your motivation come from? Where does your energy go?

Energy flows throughout the universe, and we’ve devised all manner of frameworks to access it- measured in kilowatts, directed as Chi, surrendered to God. We all need a way to measure, collect, and harness our energy. Without investigation, oftentimes our personal energy travels along unconscious paths laid down by habit, culture, and inheritance.

In 1948, the psychologist J.N. Buck developed a projective evaluation that prompts the subject to draw a house, a tree, and a person. The results can reveal insights about a person’s home life, inner world, and self-esteem. When asked to draw without context or respond to ambiguous stimuli, people often reveal internal structures—mental shortcuts laid down by family systems and formative memories. We receive generational inheritances of land, money, hygiene, debt, recipes, disease, pain, memory - that we don’t always interact with on a conscious level. Projective evaluations have given me a pathway into my consciousness to illuminate these inheritances. The process can take many forms. In this body of work, Tarot, Astrology, Internal Family systems, guided meditation, and the Celtic calendar have all become stimuli by which I could begin to sort things out.

What is intuition and what is programming? What is mission critical? What is the mission? What looks harmless but causes instability? What is inconvenient but creates grounding? How long does it take to rewire what’s been passed down for 5 generations?

With unprecedented access to education, freedom, autonomy, therapy - can we break generational curses in a single lifetime?

I approached these questions from all angles, and this body of work is the result. The feast tables are external milestones, markers of my core values being refined and prioritized over time. The woman jumping into the pool is the method, embracing exuberance and joy for life’s pleasures. The Three Card Spread reflects the internal work being done. any deep and lasting change must recruit subconscious spaces and be cultivated with patience over time.

In trying to connect with family, and understand my personal history, I dove deeper into researching my ancestry. I had a sense that if I could trace back the roots of my family to before patriarchy, before colonialism, I could find practices that would lend structure and shape to my life in a way that could actually hold and persist.

I was named after St. Brigid’s Catholic Church in San Francisco, built in 1864, a place of worship and community for the early Irish immigrants who settled in San Francisco, my forebears among them.

As a child I loved the myth of Saint Brigid, so beautiful she asked God to remove her good looks so she could focus on her faith. Revisiting this figure as an adult, I found the pagan root behind the Catholic stone-work. Brigid was first goddess from pre-Christian Irish mythology who was associated with wisdom, poetry, healing, protection, smithing and domesticated animals.

This ancient goddess has a day of veneration called Imbolc that marks the halfway point from Winter to Spring, it is traditionally a ritual cleansing of the hearth followed by a communal feast.

I pictured what a dreary prospect it would be, in the doldrums of February, to clean a fireplace of a winter’s worth of soot and grime. You’d be well obliged to, otherwise risk burning your whole house down. However, if you knew that there was a day we all set aside to complete the dreaded chore, and a great party would follow to celebrate - that could go a long way to muster the required energy.

The tradition struck me as what spirituality could look like for me, something that allows you to harness a greater source of energy, and connects you more deeply to community.

Imbolc is one of 8 holidays that comprise the Celtic wheel of the year. I integrated observances of these holidays into my artistic practice to recontextualize these rites in my present day Los Angeles. The rites become approximations, not always on the exact day, traditions are not strictly observed, the special chore list rarely seems to wind its way to zero. But we celebrate regardless- birthdays, milestones, pumpkin pancakes, we’re back from our trip, the weather is just *gorgeous* today.

I have depicted these practices in five meals, prepared over the last 5 years. The meals observe the wheel of the year and now, the flow of the years: pierogis prepared with my sister in quarantine, a dinner cast in the pink light of summer’s lengthening days, unique teas from Japan to cool summer’s heated end, a cozy breakfast with fall’s harvest, a warming birthday celebration in winter’s dark. I loved making these paintings, observing the diaristic details felt like writing postcards from my life, prompting many other memories to be preserved among the plates.

THREE CARD SPREAD

I kept having dreams of forests and beaches, nowhere I’d been in real life. I visited them over and over. A therapist advised that these dream places can be representations of the unconscious. I found a path to them through guided meditation, then a framework to understand them through tarot, astrology, and Internal Family Systems. This allowed me to conceptualize how energy moves through, or becomes trapped, in my consciousness.

These three landscapes are laid out like a simple tarot spread, a card for the past, the present, and the future. The past depicts ancestral knots, entanglements of unresolved grief, patterns of behavior, unfinished emotional work - creating cycles of repeated history and fate.

If I thought of my mind as a tree, or a mountain, maybe there could be more patience for the time it takes to form a new habit, or heal an old heartbreak. You can’t push a sapling into a tree, nor will a mountain into existence. Over time, pressure and movement shape the land. To harness that patience requires awareness, discipline, and practice. These landscapes reflect inner change as a slow geological process, 5 years of growth that felt like thousands of years of transformation in the time-scale of my unconscious. Time I spent sifting, sorting, de-cluttering, trying to develop new habits, making progress, falling back.

I learned that if you can’t form a habit, you might try a ritual. All the trappings of any self-improvement plan, but by forming it around ceremony, time, and intention you can recruit the unconsciousness to recognize that change is possible, and perhaps already progressing. These paintings were like a spell, calling in healing, new perspective, and abundance. Their many sessions of work and development shape me into a person who can receive it.

In the Rider-Waite tarot deck, the suit of swords depicts clouds as representations of the thoughts in the mind. Their height, speed, or storming reflect their dominance over the mind of the querents. The clouds in these works function much the same, the symbol implemented to take the shape of manifestations.

When you are seeking, or calling something in, you might not always know the exact shape it will take. You might be in a foggy, liminal space and uncertain how things could progress. I pictured it like a passing through a rain cloud, eventually the sun pierces through, creating reflections of light and rainbows. The patience and strength to sit through that uncertainty. When the cloud passes you might find yourself transformed, and able to recognize the gifts you wished for.