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Sacred and Profane
2025
Our gods have failed and our idols have been slain.
This body of wood-fired stoneware sculptures is a series of new deities. Birthed on a Black August moon, their creation channels millenia of rage and grief that leads up to today’s genocidal complicity, imperial supremacy, and gender violence.
The process of making these pieces has been an act of exorcism, where gesture and intuition lead the way without premeditated design. Thick-set forms, sometimes salacious, sometimes androgynous, become firmly rooted on the ground. The bodies that emerge—sacred and profane—refute the gender binary, mock puritan religiosity, and resist colonial erasure. Each extract their own origin story, drawing from radical historical moments or contemporary speculative mythology, with spirits that reclaim power and violence as reparative forces.
On 13 August 2004, a mob of 200+ women stormed the Nagpur district court in India armed with kitchen knives and chili powder, and stabbed Akku Yadav to death. Akku was on trial for serial rape and gang violence, and had repeatedly been acquitted on previous charges. Every woman living in the locality claimed responsibility for the lynching, and the courts found no one guilty. "If they took law into their hands, it was because the law had not given them succour," stated one of the high court judges. Akkughnī emerged from this history as a divinity reclaiming violence as a reparative force.
Birthed from Sonia Sulaiman's speculative fiction "Muneera and the Moon", a story rooted in Palestinian folklore and queer narratives. Muneera, the exiled daughter of primordial Eve, appears night after night to lament to the heavens, only to realize what she’d mistaken for the luminous moon is in fact another solitary woman, a martyr saint from another forbidden realm. Soon a divine love blossoms between the two. From this story emerges Ashīqat Muneera, the sentinel deity of banished lovers.
In Aztec cosmology, xiuh is flame, and xictli the navel, the center where all things begin. In the kitchens of Mexico, the abuelas often refer to household utensils as xitle, their kitchens small altars of warmth. The belly remembers fire as creation, as nourishment, as hunger’s antidote. Empire too knows fire — it burns homes, erases seeds, scorches memory. Empire incinerates lineages and starves the bellies of children. Xiuctli burns otherwise. Xiuctli is the ember that mothers breathe into clay, the umbilical fire that feeds even in forced famine. Xiuctli is wound and womb—a deity of regeneration.