OF THE BODY
There is much of the body that is beautiful, something exceptional in the animated way a face shifts into a scowl, a person’s eyes light up in excitement, hair shifts in the wind—something enrapturing in the movement of muscle beneath skin and above bone, sewn with tendons.
The gentle perfection of a well-constructed portrait can be so fragile. A normal face blooms into something unsettling with the stroke single line, the bodies we love and find familiarity in easily transform into the grotesque.
This is an homage to the gross, the disgusting, and to the beauty within and to those without. Above all this is simply Of the Body.
Warts and all.
2023
Infection
2021
Ode to Tonsil Stones
Cross Section
2023
“Was it there at the beginning of me? Was my rage a strange invisible twin that kept me company in the womb and then held on too tight inside the caul until our bodies merged, she wanted out, she wanted light, she wanted body, she wanted breath… Was it already there when they lifted me by cesarean from my mother’s gut, lodged as I was inside her too tilted pelvis, strange crooked cradle, my mother born with one leg more than six inches shorter than the other, her daughters cut from her body, my sister first, then me years later. Was my rage born of the missed opportunity to wrestle free through the birth canal, through the open mouth of my mother? Or was my rage my mother’s? Or her mother’s? Or hers? An inherited creature?”
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, Letter to My Rage
Feral Girlhood
2023
Open
2023
Self Portrait 1
2023
Jaelyn
2023
Hollow/ Self Portrait 2
2023
Violet Tillman is an aspiring poet and visual artist. She spends (perhaps too much of) her time lost in her own thoughts wherein she traverses worlds, strings words into sentences into poetry, and considers her stances on the moral debates she will conduct with her friends. She doesn’t know what path these interests will lead her along, but she is excited to spend this wild and precious life finding out.
A senior, she attends the Renaissance School of Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is getting ready to enter college. She currently lives on a farm in Nelson County, and is enjoying terrorizing their most recent batch of lambs this spring.