INFESTED INFEST, Stephanie Forbes, October 2021

 “The cicada has three jewels at the top of their head, ocelli, these jewels are blood red, having been said to have witnessed the depths of hell and aid the body in finding light source and coming to surface. I believe the human spirit must carry weights and evils unimaginary to transcend. These are the moments of my personal depths. And the highlights that will remain.

INFESTED / INFEST is an investigation of spirit that examines the causation factors of hypochondria as traumas manifested in adulthood. The cicada is used to express the narrative of the journey towards excavating or simply just understanding trauma and how it manifests itself beginning in childhood. 

The cicada life-cycle is used as a parallel depiction of personal experience and journey toward self. As hypochondria is highlighted, it is understood as a sense of infestation of spirit. The cicada must infest a source to overcome its enemy. And, one must allow themselves to be infested with information available to understand core existence and purpose so that we may also overcome and slowly  place together the hysteric puzzle of our lives and begin to heal. 

As a cicada molts, the human spirit molts also, in its physical vessel, consuming and navigating this life to eventually become its best, most completed self for the next. As the narrative of my life seems to ever change, it is in these stories, that I find myself trying to tell that I realize; Maybe it is not art in its physical and tangible state of being that I am endowed to and in love with, but rather, the consumption of the individual and their unique human experience lending itself to my understanding, and the feen for dialogue that inevitably presents itself after. 

We must connect with each other and allow the sovereign sacredness of the unique individual to play. To interact with this life as it sees fit, so that we may deepen an understanding for each other and what it means to be fully and authentically alive. 

There is a vast, deep individual richness to each of us that no one else has, and it is the only thing we have in common.

How revered and Divine it is to get to understand a life experience in a million different ways.”

THE GROUNDWORK,

A parallel human experience to the periodical cicadas life underground

Effect

2014, 2015, 2016 Journal Entries

Cause / Effect I, II, III

Acrylic on paper,

3, 15.5 x 18”

hypochondria affirmations & care seeking behavior

EMERGENCE

The metamorphosis of the cicada and the transitions of the human spirit

‘Self Portrait’
Plaster, Wire, Foam, Nylon
Suspended Sculpture

To My Dearest,
Spirit Daughter,

I dream of you forming in the womb
pulling you from source
the space where you molted and formed.

And breathing in the first fresh breath of new life
with you
My eyes pulse,
swollen shut then open, somehow still full of warm salt

You, are everything and more.

And I hold you, softly squeezing every radiating ounce of pureness that you are
in my chest, on my chest, feeling the beat of you after transforming in me
moving into your new life.

And my body, the carcass that remains

for you I’d give my vessel, and from my vessel you will be.
And my rage marinates as my bones form the broth of anger and fear
to know the vulnerable space in your being beating good and gentle how that space,

will be eaten.

That space, consumed by the zombies who dance among you.

and you will suffer.

And my bones will sit in the boiling water
as I watch on the frontline of your life
as these spaces morph and you are transformed by Spirit again.
And I will help you chisel the dirt that will release you, over and over.

You are here, on some plane somewhere, existing and molting

all but forming in my womb

you are, before you are here