Welcome to the Studio with Komikka!

I had an experience while in New York that stayed with me… If we can revisit 9th grade and pick up Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. You know the book where the man wakes up as a cockroach and has to come to terms with being what society deems as ugly. Kafka challenges the readers to reflect on empathy and themes centered around alienation and dehumanization (I took so many high school reads for granted). Well that was me before dawn that day; I woke up as one of my biggest fears and I am so grateful. There was a lot happening leading up to this moment— a lot of identifying where I have suppressed fear, allowing my fearful self to be heard, seen, and felt—but this was a very important peak that I have revisited time and time again since. One of many laborious but gratifying peaks. A fear of ugly. The work that I am working on now even stimulated a Revisiting as I found myself adding sores and wounds to my body, presenting them with bejeweled offerings to my future audience. I guess I’m still processing that glorious show of Wangachi Mutu at the New Museum last year. Strange that high school readings can return years later to nest inside your life, like dormant seeds.

*“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”*
― **Franz Kafka,** **The Metamorphosis**

A Body in Bloom: The Blue Lotus and Other Ugly Things

In mud-soaked rivers, the blue lotus blooms without apology, making beauty out of decay, rising and falling in waters that rarely reach the eye. Perhaps we are not so different from these petals, clinging to the world despite the dirt and silt around us. Our wounds and bruises tell a story; they make us worthy to stand beside that lotus in our own way.

The Blue Lotus

For some, it is the symbol of wisdom, rebirth, and the quiet triumph that blossoms from mud-soaked roots, a timeless emblem of our own becoming. Reflections on Beauty and the Blue Lotus

Beauty, like the blue lotus, is born in the darkness and emerges in light. Perhaps what makes it beautiful is that it doesn’t try to hide from the shadows, honoring them as part of the whole. The blue lotus stands in mud and, unashamed, lifts itself to bloom. And that, I’m learning, is what it means to be complete.

On Perfectionism and Self-Rejection

Perfectionism often stems from internalizing diminished versions of ourselves due to unaccepted aspects of who we are. Culturally, this manifests as societal standards—beauty and beyond. When self-rejection becomes normalized and fear is exploited, it opens the door to self-depreciation. Unaddressed fears breed anxiety, and unresolved shame can take a toll on both mental and physical health. What starts as something small can gradually grow into something of overwhelming significance. Perfectionism: is a mask, a lie that pushes us to forget the beauty in our imperfections. In it, I found a mirror to my own self-doubt, to anxieties that grow when beauty hides too deep. And still, as I spent time with a close friend, talking of Jacob’s Ladder—the heavenly path to creation and descent—I wondered if maybe we are meant to hold both: our light and our darkness, beautiful and bruised. How often do we place ourselves at the foot of that ladder, feeling too heavy to climb?

The bridge between heaven and earth; A crossroads or a portal, or a vagina. And The effort to climb, pursue, or even engage with the divine—the divine in this context is a type of knowing—that blooms as one sheds conditional love.

Going back to the cockroach experience, After that day, I found myself walking down the streets of New York Introducing myself to cockroaches and telling them that I was grateful for their experience. And the value they brought to me as raw existential beings.

I realized my problem or fear of them was a fear of my own self. A fear that was acceptable and even understood by my community. No matter which culture one may exist in, a cockroach is told to get out or be killed. Their extermination is acceptable. And some may even pray for the day that we no longer have to face such ugliness. I wonder if the people that wish for this would love themselves still if one day they work the skin of a roach, would they avoid the mirror and abstain from public outings?

As I mentioned, all of this came back up when working in this piece as I embellished dark marks and placed fossils in a torn open abstract rib cage. Looking at it made me uncomfortable for a few days. I wonder if I would present it as a depiction of my body. If I wanted to claim it. Claim something intentionally and unintentionally made ugly. What would others think, would people want to add it to their collection amongst the beautiful? Did I consider it beautiful? Beauty was a word that was next to my art and I guess now the time to have that tested. Beauty is another limited belief that must break. I had no idea it would affect my art the way it has. I am used to creating images that are complex layered and maybe chaotic and at times I have used the word beautiful to describe the essence or possibly the technique of my work and as I continue to unfold, my own limiting beliefs on beauty and perfection witnessing the transition into, embellishing the grow test and getting comfortable with presenting it as a version of self is incredibly powerful for me emotionally mentally and socially.

Not long ago, someone said to me, “The way you did things before may no longer serve you.” It’s a wisdom I wear now, lighter than the chains of certainty I once held. It’s as if beauty itself were speaking, asking me to let go of perfection, to cherish the rough earth where blue lotuses bloom.

Other Symbols Within The Work

There’s a quiet wisdom in the stones, a memory etched in ancient fossils—a reminder that even in stillness, something endures. Fossils are imprints of time, fragments of life transformed, preserving the echoes of beings that have known survival beyond decay. They carry the shape of what once moved, what once breathed, reminding us that beauty, too, is layered in the marks of endurance.

These remnants are stories in stone, pieces of our past selves we might have buried but never truly lost. As I work, I find myself placing fossils within my art, in abstract rib cages and jagged landscapes, honoring the parts of me that have been scarred but never silenced. Perhaps there is beauty in these scars, in the soft resilience of something unbreakable, left behind to remind us who we are, and how we became.

In art, volcanoes symbolize both creation and destruction, embodying forces that can shape landscapes and obliterate them in moments. They represent the powerful, often volatile emotions lurking beneath the surface—anger, passion, and transformation. As a visual symbol, volcanoes evoke the tension between stability and eruption, between restraint and release, mirroring the intensity of human experience. Artists often use volcanoes to explore themes of rebirth, change, and the raw beauty of nature’s cycles, capturing the power of destruction as a pathway to new forms of creation and growth.

The Dodecagrams symbolizes creation, balance, harmony, created by connecting the 12 intersections of the 12 outer circles necessary to create the egg of life, a cycle of creation. 12 also symbolizes the illusion of time.

The turtle carries the weight of time, wisdom layered in each step, reminding us that endurance is a form of grace. Its shell, a sanctuary of stone and bone, shields against the world’s harshness, yet within it, there’s softness—a quiet resilience, a slow, unhurried strength. In art, the turtle becomes a guardian of ancient knowledge, a keeper of secrets buried deep within the earth and the waters.

Fear Of Ugly
I caught myself saying “How can a collage artist be afraid of ugly when that is the inspiration to push. Or the inspiration to stop, the inspiration to begin, the inspiration to end. The inspiration to allow or the inspiration to destroy. I felt myself waking into a strange place—one where beauty felt as foreign as a cockroach’s shell. It wasn’t just the insect I had been afraid of—it was a vision of myself in pieces, scattered and real, too vulnerable to feel beautiful. But I had work to do, wounds to reopen and jewels to place inside each mark like offerings for some unknown ceremony.

As I keep shedding what no longer serves, I’m finding that beauty lies in the imperfect, the raw, the brave. May we all embrace the parts of ourselves we’ve been afraid to see, and find, within them, the delicate strength to rise. I’m excited to see where these explorations take me, and I look forward to continuing the work of deprogramming the constructs I’ve internalized. As I continue to break boxes that I have been comfortable living in, I feel more expansive in my perception but also more extensive in my vocabulary to verbally share my experience. Until next time, thank you for coming along.

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- Komikka Patton