I hope you can forgive my muteness. I didn’t mean to put you on hold like this — my return is not in vain, and I here apologize for the noncommittal teasing language. Soon became later, later nearly became never, this year turned to the next, and next year never came… until, finally, now. If it suffices for clarity, I am not one to present you with a collection created in haste for the sake of releasing something new for your consumption, and it is not in my interest to overstimulate you with material like an algorithmic machine. I maintain commitment to intentional, thoughtful, spaced out releases of work crafted in deeply inspired moments only offered when it altogether truly feels developed and coheres into a themed narrative for your imagination’s sensual wander. I treasure such an unusual privilege to serve you in this way.
As a token of my apologies, I now offer you Act III: Muted Decadence — a bold cyberspaced display of some of my more opulent erotic trajectories rectified in the throes of reluctant yet conditional muteness. This heated offering serves the feminine form’s myriad tribulations starring fantastical self-objectification, possessed agency through subdued control, the ecstasy in such restraint, and its cathartic release in fallen tears. I present you a personal, raw demonstration of an obsequious dreamscape captured in the adornment of meticulously woven hardened patterns born through endured and lived cycles through the charmed, the adverse, and the mundane, all while taking in the weight of the world’s maddening disharmony in glimmering untethered hope.
Here it arrives after a prolonged incubation period — behind us now are the shadowed times spent in reclusive introspection healing deep creative wounds exercised out into the buzzing fog of chaosmotic sunrise discotheques, reveling in the camaraderie of collective sonic alchemy — a roaring exultation of bodily conspiration transmuting any projected muteness envy into beaming candied eusexua.
One evening in a surrendered moment high in the Piscean supermoon’s illumination, at last, shame’s projection that carried through each turbulent violation committed against me, broke through — shaking at the floor of my bedside, I still held on that this pummeling of teardrops was the finale, the expulsion of that shame, relinquished to the cosmos for atomic transmutation into unthinkable novel possibilities for transcendence. I breathe out the last remnants. All what remains is illuminated.
Before the space is opened for such coveted illumination, I herein challenge your deeper contemplative mind: when you gaze into the reflection of the desired glossed surface, do you arrive to the subject with circumspection and care, or with vanity and indifference? Is your action integral to your intentions? Do you hold the tension with discipline, or do you lose yourself to recklessness?
And are you dignified in exactly what you see reflected right back to you?
In whom you see, do you see me?
What more do you want from me?
While you ponder all that and get back to me later —
You may take this as a modest “right now, for now, this is what I’ve come up with” from me in my continued sacral calling to craft complicated things in simpler patterns, signaling to those who seek revelation in facing on and breaking through all things shadowed. I don’t sketch out anything for collection releases, rather I draw inspiration from every offshoot of living, focus into the concept and channel its feeling, envision what’s beckoning to be created, and just get weaving. Sometimes, I am not sure even what I am getting into at the start — happy accidents aren’t uncommon… And it can be a bit of a hardware laboratory in here if you can imagine it, scaled down to a cluttered and chaotic diorama of the sort, littered with piles of scrap metal and flying steel jump rings — the floor is at times a hazard, and I wouldn’t dare to carelessly step barefoot in this here room…
Everything in this charmed creative construction zone is crafted from a desk and a single dress form at a corner of my bedroom, utilizing the foot of my bed for dressing and a mirror or two to see if it’s all coming together. And unlike previous releases of work, none of the works in Muted Decadence are adjustable and are instead entirely one size or custom fitting.
When I craft any given large scale work, I often use myself as a dress form at many points in the process, so the samples are made to just fit me, which left me with little choice other than to face this one head on as the presenting model. Although this is the most appropriate decision given the deeply personal nature of these works, you will have to forgive me for the timid chill it’s all brought on for me.
“possessive is my daybed” — twigs, ‘daybed’
So, these are the works crafted in muted decadence, in all their pain, passion, suffocation, and glory. May it hold you breathless, just as it has for me time and time again. And in such captive breathlessness, I offer to provoke compelled imagination into demystifying veiled truth in my most vulnerable work yet, crafted within such condensed conditions in the last two years, conceived in the last three — and that I can trust you with your curious speculation of it.
I thank you for your continued support in my creative vision in my passion project aiding in unconventional sacral healing, release, and transmutation, iron creatrix. This is my craft, my bodily reclamation, and my wearable performance art, altogether chipping away suffocating heteronormative influences hereby ringing in liberating possibilities where the offbeat pleasures inherent to queerness can collectively breathe freely. And to that end, my body, in its aura, its adornment, its sensations, its pleasures, and its boundaries, in all its queerness, inescapable femininity, and peculiarity, is entirely my own.
In exercising such artistic freedom with accessible talk therapy, stable living, wellness habits, self care, and my personal support system, community web, and spiritual relationships… I hope here that my own growth is recognized and impressionable, so from here on we further collaboratively aid in one another’s healing and progression, and that anyone taking notice who might be struggling can too imagine and believe in hope’s celestial infinities for us all.
And to twigs: thank you for putting a name on that nearly ineffable feeling in the air of countless unforgettable nights dancing through the dark where I felt the same way, one whose movement of frequencies propelled this collection’s final moments to completion.
You have to know, I got the first ring for all this about seven years ago, only answering the calling just over two years later. We’re four years into this call now, but my second line stays ringing off the hook, and that dotted call waiting tone has me split. Your missed call’s message recording still played back too spotty for me to make it out, so it stays on my mind going forward — are we edging towards the moment we hang up the phone?
–lyra
Photos by Wolf