Lament

Lament, its first collection, begins with the act of believing something to be true while living inside it. A present experience appears to repair what came before, until its own reality collapses and, with it, the meaning it had given to the past. What remains is a lament for both: what was lost in the present and what seemed, briefly, to have been healed.

The collection places this condition onto the body through armour built from its own fragilities. Phallic forms are worn without discretion or apology, fetishised objects become protection, and reflective surfaces turn that protection back towards the body wearing it.

Here, armour does not conceal vulnerability. It is constructed from it. What appears hard, sexual or defensive carries the evidence of the thing it was made to protect. Lament exists within that contradiction, between exposure and defence, desire and prohibition, reflection and belief, and the moment when what was thought to be real becomes something that was only ever imagined to be so.

I do not know what I felt today. That is the truest sentence I can write. Something moved through me in the morning, quick, almost violent, and by the time I sat down to name it, it had already changed shape. Was it want. Was it fear. Was it the strange overlap where they become the same thing and you cannot tell anymore which one is driving.

I keep starting sentences and crossing them out. Not on paper, in my head. I felt too much and also nothing at all, both at once, which sounds impossible until it happens to you and you realize feelings do not take turns the way people describe them. They stack. They fight each other for the same inch of your chest.

I touched the piece I am working on before I understood why. My hand knew something my head had not caught up to yet. Maybe that is the whole point of making things with your hands. You get to feel first and understand later, if you understand at all.

I am not writing this to solve it. I am writing it because not knowing what I feel is, apparently, also a feeling. And I would rather keep it than pretend I know.

Nakedness was never the goal. It was the only honest starting point. Before there was a brand, a mark, a name stitched into metal, there was skin that refused to lie about what it wanted. Fetish taught me that desire does not need permission to be beautiful, that restraint can be a form of tenderness, that a body stripped of everything performative finally tells the truth.

Lament is what happens after that truth has been spoken and the room goes quiet:

Not shame,

not regret, but the ache of having been fully seen.

Every piece in this collection carries that ache forward. It was made naked, in the oldest sense of the word, and it asks to be worn the same way, close enough to skin that it remembers exactly where it came from.