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Sacred and Profane
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. Their spirits reclaim power and violence as reparative forces, and expel fear and fragility to oblivion.
On 13 August 2004, a mob of 200+ women armed with kitchen knives and chili powder stormed the Nagpur district court in India 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 and law-enforcing agencies had not given them succour," stated one of the high court judges. Akkughnī, salacious and ruthless, is a divinity reclaiming violence as a reparative force.
Muneera, the exiled daughter of Eve, appears night after night to lament to the heavens, only to realize what she’d taken for the luminous moon is in fact another solitary woman — a martyr saint from another veiled realm. Soon, a divine love blossoms between the two. Birthed from Sonia Sulaiman's story rooted in Palestinian folklore and queer narratives, Ashīqat Muneera is a new deity birthed to guard all exiled lovers in persecution.
In Aztec cosmology, Xiuh is flame, and Xictli the navel, the center where all things begin. In the kitchens of Mexico, las 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. Pray to the navel of fire so the flames in our bellies never die.