Collateral BEAUTY: Part 1. No More Silence

My entire life I was told “Don’t Tell.”

This exhibition is for all the other women who have lived through intimate personal terrorism and held these secrets for 12,000 generations. It’s about mistreatment in the most odious way. Silent to everyone but the victim. This work is a closed subject matter to many people, but it is time to tell the truth about emotional and verbal abuse. It is time to open the conversation.

Collateral BEAUTY: Part 1, No More Silence is a beginning and a small part of my story. It’s very personal. I want to tell my history and experience so that it opens a space for others to tell theirs. No More Silence speaks out about being shamed, controlled, criticized, smothered, and defamed.

In public, I wore the masks and pretended to live the homogenized version of happiness. But, behind closed doors, it was wretched and sickening. Dismissed by loved ones, friends, even family, I disappeared into passive nothingness, and was quashed by control. The lies, deceit, the constant badgering and control, and the dismissal of my true self caused me to suffocate into a tiny, diminished shell of myself. Art saved my life and provided me a place of safety.

No one listened to me until, for a few minutes, I literally died. For a time, I asked myself why I lived through such a catastrophe.

Now, I know why I am still here. I lived so I can articulate my story. I am deeply grateful to be alive, and thankful I can create narrative art of an ignored but very important problem.

I will use my voice to declare and profoundly express the difficulty many women face every day, just like I have my entire life.

After absolutely dissolving, I slowly swirled into a sacrificial awakening and have found my freedom; my true “self.” Like The Firebird I live a life of art, music, peace, love, and belonging.

No More Silence.

“We have art so that we shall not die of reality.” Friedrich Nietzsche