an illustration of a fat, feathered, bird-clawed & horned, queer & trans Jewish demon, seated above Yiddish text reading "feygele." the figure is chained by the wrists but appears arrogant & inviting.
a poem with an illustration of bird with a person's head & crown of stars. the title (in Hebrew) is "sheyd
FEYGELE, 2020.
a sheyd (Jewish demon) inspired by two major stylistic influences, Leonard Baskin & Aubrey Beardsley, and also by the #AugustAdiPOSE & #FatArt hashtags on Twitter. the title/text “feygele” is a Yiddish word meaning “little bird” often used as pejorative slang for a queer person – here also playing off the figure’s size & the bird-like attributes of sheydim in folklore. a queer/trans fat Jewish aspiration!
still one of my favorite portraits i’ve ever done! a friend & former student of mine who is now an incredible fashion designer. from her Design Museum profile:
Today, Noèl is a Mexico City-based artist interested in shifting perceptions of intimacy and revitalizing a sense of fantasy through the dissection of queer and Afro-Latinx identity through clothing construction, mixed media installations, fiber practices, and video. Her work centers the power of physical touch and moves through a romanticized reality of the discarded. She poeticizes the relationships of her Dominican elders and her own stories of existing as a queer, fat, femme, racially ambiguous, trans person.
she’s currently raising money to build a foundation for her clothing brand & you can help out here!
a collection of trans affirmations (text provided by friends & strangers online) made into sigils. this zine is always free & can be downloaded, printed & freely shared here. the pins are occasionally available through my Etsy shop.
this little zine has traveled much farther & gotten more love than i could have ever anticipated in the 5 years it’s been circulating. i have a folder on my computer of photos that folks have sent me after they got one or more of these images tattooed (i’ve given standing permission for anyone to use them that way) - one person even has the whole set all down their spine.
some thoughts on sigils below the cut
i’ve been making sigils for years - for me that means images that amplify intent, whose encryption of text into abstract symbols almost paradoxically allows you to hold the words closer to you. the process i use is partially derived from the work of Austin Osman Spare, a 19th-20th century artist & occultist who was himself obviously influenced by earlier western esoteric traditions that violently appropriated (mainly) Jewish written magic (you can read my whole zine on this history here), so as a Jewish artist i try to be intentional about acknowledging that lineage - you can find a bunch of tutorials on “how to make sigils” that will give you the Spare method without any context or connection to anything that came before it - & also being clear that i approach them from my own conceptual frameworks. i believe images only have the power we give them, that the power in these sigils is community care & self-affirmation, that they don’t need to be “supernatural” to be “magic” (in the way that art & connections between people are magic).
i’ve also done a number of personal sigil commissions by donation to causes that are important to me - in 2020 i used sigil-making to raise over 1K for bail funds to free protesters & support mutual aid for communities impacted by police violence. that’s the kind of magic they are to me - they help us do what we need to do.
of course everyone can engage with them on their own terms, but that’s where i’m coming from as the creator!
