Persephone Roe
Take estrogen with me (2024)
The Old Body
Acrylic, Linen, Wood
70in by 20 in by 6in
Glittering Inferno
Acrylic, Cotton
36in by 24in
Starlight Garden
Acrylic, Cotton
48in by 36in
Basilisk
Acrylic, Cotton
36in by 24in
Crystal Armor
Acrylic, Cotton
22in by 28in
Scheherazade
Acrylic, Cotton
20in by 14in
This body of work came about because I started hormone replacement therapy. Estradiol is like Alice in Wonderland, in a strange and wonderful way, it not only reshapes the body but also transfigures the texture of experience, its emotional timbre.
I had this idea of painting, going back to the caves in Lascaux, that had to do with smearing and scraping at a cave wall. And of some original mark, invented merely to designate a place one had visited, but which secretly recorded the story of its author’s life.
It was as if I were undertaking a long voyage, over active volcanoes and untouched forests and along the bottom of the sea. When we go on trips we take our bodies with us, but this time I left my body behind. I’m moving through bodies, across the modalities and potentialities afforded by some ultra-body entity.
It felt necessary for me to record what it felt like, this desperate flight through form, because I knew I was leaving it all behind.
I became interested in alchemy because I felt that what I was doing with my body was a form of alchemy, transmuting matter to purify the soul.
So I read Paracelsus. What else is a girl to do? He says you can make a homunculus–that is, a very small man–if you pu into a glass cucurbite and heat it for 30 days at the highest ventus equinus, which creates the embryonic form of this human or humanlike creature, sort of a wriggling white paste, then incubate it for another eight months in the cucurbite, feeding it every day with your blood and maintaining a constant temperature. You can create a basilisk through a similar process, but you use period blood instead of cum. The basilisk turns you to stone if you ever see it, that’s how horrible it is. Paracelsus explains that the basilisk’s tremendous corrupting power is a consequence of the corrupting power of menstruating women, advising the reader to avoid both at all costs.
I started working on "The Old Body," envisioning it as a kind of homunculus, and the process of its creation as a way of exorcising the body I was leaving behind. I felt haunted by that body, and I felt that it needed a physical repository, somewhere to go.
Lost in Dreams (2024)
Shadow Memory
Acrylic, Cotton
11in by 14in
Labyrinth
Acrylic, Cotton
8.5in by 8.5in
These works explore the estrangement of memory, when the person you were is no longer recognizable, and your past seems to belong to someone else. Or you find yourself warping your perception of the past, in order to forge some continuity out of a disjointed life
Frozen Hearts (2023)
Invisible Cities
Ink, Paper
15in by 22in
The Ice Storm
Ink, Paper
15in by 22in
Under the Ice
Ink, Paper
15in by 22in