❦ Artist and Muse
Digital Illustration & Mixed-Media Collage Luna J. Yvelisse, 2025
Artist & Muse is a self-portrait. As the artist, the subject, & the muse, I reject the historical tradition of women existing solely as objects of admiration. We are creators, storytellers, & subjects. Through this work, I invite viewers to examine femininity through the lens of bodily autonomy & the contradictions imposed upon women. Society celebrates women in theory—as mothers, muses, lovers, goddesses, & caretakers yet often values us according to beauty standards, respectability politics, reproductive capacity, desirability, & the labor our bodies, minds, & spirits can produce. We are praised when we are useful, disciplined when we are autonomous, & condemned when we refuse to be possessed. Rather than separating beauty from intellect or sensuality from spirituality, Artist & Muse rejects those false binaries. It reclaims adornment, desire, softness, rage, & self-representation as expressions of agency rather than vanity. My body becomes an altar not an object of consumption, but a site of creativity, healing, devotion, & power. Built as a devotional collage, what you witness defines my visual language & personal world: paintbrushes, pigments, tropical flora, shells, crystals, sacred objects, celestial imagery, & references to Afro-Indigenous Caribbean spirituality & Espiritismo. These recurring symbols represent the things I love & the worlds that have shaped me, woven together into a personal archive of identity, ancestry, memory, & creation.