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Virginia Woolf famously declared that for women to make art, they needed £500 a year (rather more now) and rooms of their own … It takes a monstrous gesture to claim that space. As artists we have learned we have to take up the whole house, upstairs and down, attic and basement. Alice-like we will have to spill out of all the windows and doors and out into the street, making the private public, the domestic political.
Lauren Elkin
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WAVES is our generative source, our steady and ongoing call to each other, and our tribute to the enormity of what we make, witness, and inhabit as creative women.
We see ourselves as co-creators in this evolving, voluminous project.
Submit Your Art and Writing to WAVES
“Feed the Demon: From the Femina Ornamentalis Series” by Salma Caller
What does my art mean to me? My art and writing define me. They are my way of living and being alive. They are how I understand myself and the world I move in. My art and writing, inseparable from each other, arise from a fault line running through my identity. Egyptian father and English mother. Intense confrontation holds hands with curious meeting. Across the fault line weaving back and forth are threads and vines. My art and writing are the threads and vines that bring together the unexpected, and hold contradictions within one body.
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For a short time I walked the earth as a woman, breathed in the scent of gardenias and gasoline, made love to a man. We lived in a small house with a narrow staircase leading upwards into nothing; the second floor was never built. I fed him fresh garlic and parsley from our garden, the smell rising to the top of the staircase where we made love, knees and ribcages bumping against the ceiling. But my throat grew dry, my feet stuck in the dust. At night, while he slept, I walked down to the marsh where the birds gathered to dive for fish, the water wetting my waterless lips, the gentle rocking soothing the aches in my feet, my arms. Please, I said to the white tern bringing her six little hatchlings bits of fish guts, you a mother who has so many children, help me a mother who has none.
The next morning, I woke up vomiting feathers. In a few months, my belly was round and full as a blowfish and I felt the flutter against my ribcage. I walked down to the banks of the marsh, spread my legs, and out she came, a pure royal tern, her white feathers beaded with blood. She was hungry and I had nothing to give her; she would not take my milk. I waded out to find the mother bird on the other side of the marsh. I cannot help you, she said, I have my own children to feed. So I turned into a fish. My daughter dove, grasped me in her beak, and swallowed me whole. Now, I live within her light body. We spend our days upon the high winds, bumping only against the sky. Now, I feed her.
“The Woman Who Wanted a Child” by Holly Karapetkova
“Calculation of Angels” by Ann-Marie Brown
As a creative woman, my deepest need is: That the paintings I create be seen.
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The Q: Is our art ever too much? How do we respond when it floods our boundaries? How can we embody the flood?
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Mother and daughter still hum together.
Their low pitch voices accompany
any work of their hands.
Peeling of purple skin potatoes.
Whipping them until smooth on tongue.
They hum over a big breasted bird basting.
Butternut squash peeled, simmered,
cinnamon & coconut milk added.
Mother looks at her daughter. She smiles.
In the womb, her body hummed
along with her.
Their voices float
in the yellow
morning light.
“Vibrations” by Jerrice J. Baptiste
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