I became a vegetarian at the age of eleven. The first — regarded as diabolic by my Catholic, Hungarian family — conscious choice of mine. Emphasis on the choice. I’m not here to preach or demonise.

I began writing this collection with interrogating the different dimensions of appetite, consumption, and choice. Why do I crave for distance in romance? Why do I reject naïveté? Why am I picky with forks? Why do I enjoy arguing with middle-aged men? And the most interesting one: Can appetite be tied to one’s primitive identity?

Pink-Eyed Rabbit is a poetry and prose collection exploring the formation of a woman’s (my) appetite. It began with the rabbit, and there came a church, some cigarettes, kitten heals, a lamb, horses in dreams, and I was back at the swing; munching on my grandmother’s plum dumplings.

I took tiny bites from the stream of my consciousness that continued to break way for the flow so naturally, at times it felt haunting.

Writing Pink-Eyed Rabbit one of my core objectives was to make it simple. Leave room. Boycott that obnoxious over-explanation we are so inclined to. Even now, flipping through the book, it feels uncomfortable.

But space is something I know we are all in need of right now.

Pink-Eyed Rabbit offers you that.

Written by Azuréa Imola Rózsa

Instagram: @111arim

You can order Pink-Eyed Rabbit: https://amzn.eu/d/06Fk7wyf

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/255930363-pink-eyed-rabbit

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In the momentary silence of in-betweens, after experiencing the passing of something profound, the initial tastes of transience emerge. She presents herself to me through the void, it moulds, folds, shifts, and spirals relentlessly ever since. At times I sit with her; she offers me rescue from the illusory infinity of a paralysis.

Much as I might have denied, defied, feared, brutalised, and resented her initially, death has shaped me into who I am and who I am not. Death revealed my soul, connected me with humans, the trees, and animals, and a core morality I could not delineate if a gun was pointed at my head. And as I evolved, death became the most profound teacher of my existence.

Death is a mirror. and death is omnipresent. because of that, we are left with no other choice but to look at it.

Death. XIII. Den Haag. The Netherlands. Friday the thirteenth. June. MMXXV. Circle of Transience. What follows is the documentation of an evening dedicated to exploring contemporary death perception in the context of Western Europe.

Circle of Transience, created by Míra Gyalog, filmed by Alejandro Ramirez, 2025

“What does death mean to me?

I don’t believe in death. You can feel the presence of death yet still be alive, or somebody close to you can pass away but you can still feel their presence. The act of dying is so abstract and nebulous, it’s hard to think about it without the consequences attached to it. Death suggests identity. Attachment. Death is separation. The question is who is the one to die, is it I? I don’t know what death means, because I never died. I already died countless times. I am in a constant cycles of violent decay. The shutdown of body and mind. The vessel that’s left will decompose and create/nurture new life later on. Death is a circle. Death is like a gate. We’ll all die but it’s part of life. The opposite of confusion: a sense of definite. One thing is undeniable: death is universal. Everyone will face death, encounter death, wrestle death, and maybe, who knows, even succeed. Death is an irreversible crossing from one realm to the other. Because of death, life has meaning. Because of death, I live life. I feel like everything ends by death. It’s the last dot to a story. Change, then permanence. Metamorphosis. Death is the end of a chance to be. Death is a transformation. Death is really funny, it is like Russian roulette. In times of solitude I think and only think, if death has a meaning then life probably has one too. Meaning is an irritably unbridgeable desire of the mind. It exists not to be fulfilled, but sought. Death is the great equaliser. That which has no prejudice, morality, preference, or ambition. One way or another we have to say goodbye, whether we like it or not. Do I look forward to it? Honestly, sometimes I do. Quiet above all else. To fall in love with zests, to dream. To experience death: all real, until they aren’t. Sadness. Emptiness. Nothingness. The split of identity. Death is something you can’t comprehend. And what you can’t comprehend your brain has a tendency to avoid thinking about. When you think about death, do you want to die? But is there also a reason you would want to live? To think we’re alive, therefore we must die.

Death is everything, everyone, and all other circumstances of existence.”

‘What does death mean to me?’, blend of Circle of Transience participatory voices, 2025

‘What does death mean to me?’, artworks created by Circle of Transience participants, 2025

article written by Míra Gyalog

Míra Gyalog is an experimental artist and designer whose work moves between symbolism, culture, and the inner architecture of the human psyche. Her practice explores the distinct aspects of the phenomena of identity and collective transformation within contemporary society. Míra Gyalog is the editor of universarchive.

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I’m so glad I’m an artist because I can’t imagine dealing with my feelings any other way than by sublimating them into art.

Last year, I fell in love with a girl whom I didn’t know in real life. I was genuinely obsessed with her; there was not a day or hour when she wasn’t on my mind. Later I realised that it was limerence*, because there was no reason to be so crazy about someone you don’t even know. After I had already drawn enough portraits of her, I felt that maybe I should take on a bigger project: something that could distract me for longer. So I came up with an animation.

Since I was a kid, I loved imagining music videos for the songs I listened to. A few years ago, I rediscovered a band called Sexy Sushi. I enjoyed their music so much that I immediately looked for translations of some of their lyrics. One of them—“Oublie moi”—touched my soul in a special way. I could easily imagine a music video for that song. The idea stayed in my mind for a long time.

As I thought about the concept and scenario for my animation, my vision became progressively clearer. I listened to the song over and over again, searching for the perfect moments for shot transitions. Since it was based on a real experience, I began working on a storyboard. I wanted to create not merely a script for the music video, but a dynamic, lively experience full of emotion. The story I’m telling in animation is about a girl (me, of course) who falls in love with a music star (my crush) whom she sees on TV and becomes obsessed with. My idea was to portray how this obsession feels and looks through situations and locations from my real life: to show it’s not all just a fantasy.

Besides music and feelings, I was also inspired by the films of Satoshi Kon, who ingeniously worked with the concepts of dreams, reality, and unreality. I drew the animation from May until December, taking breaks when I felt stuck, and then continued working on it again. The vision was constantly changing and growing. I was not working on the animation chronologically, but rather starting with parts I was sure about. I don’t know whether my animation project actually helped me through my obsession, but I’m very glad that I went for it. It was a great artistic experience. I understood that it was indeed possible for me to create a 3-minute-long animation because I had been scared of starting a project like this before.

And perhaps the girl in the animation will watch it someday, too.

*Limerence is a psychological term for an intense and overwhelming attraction to another person. It includes constant thoughts about them and a strong need for their attention or affection. Unlike mature love, limerence is driven more by longing and emotional obsession than stability.

written by Liza Honcharenko

edited by Míra Gyalog

about Liza Honcharenko: Liza Honcharenko is a 23-year-old Ukrainian artist born in Kupiansk and currently based in Prague. She focuses primarily on short comics and frame-by-frame animation, finding inspiration in everyday life and people around her, reflected in her work through her own unique perspective. She also creates illustrations using both digital and traditional techniques, printmaking works, and original crochet works.

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I write poetry because it is the only place I am honest. I do not open up easily in the world, but on the page I can say everything. Poetry is where my feelings go when they have nowhere else to sit. My poems carry the turbulence of my life. They are not neat or resolved. They are fragments of survival, moments of trying to stay afloat. Writing has been how I have kept myself sane, how I have traced the shape of my mind as it changes, fractures, and repairs itself.

I am the Head of English at a secondary school, which means I spend much of my time teaching poetry written by cynical men who have been dead for centuries. I teach it well. I teach it with respect. But I also write poetry to remind myself that language is not finished, that words still mean something in a world where everything is shortened, skimmed, and half felt. I have always understood poetry as something physical, long before I understood it as a literary form.

As a child, I would sit in the back of a car and watch rain collect on the window. They were never just raindrops. They were sentient lives racing each other down the glass, splitting, merging, slowing, speeding up, each one trying to reach the bottom first. I did not have language for it then, but that was poetry. Pattern. Movement. Meaning where none had been announced. Nature does this constantly. It offers metaphor without asking to be analysed. It just exists. Somewhere along the way, people are taught that poetry is stiff and unreachable, something like “half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all in the valley of Death rode the six hundred,” frozen on a page and killed by over-analysis. We forget that poetry is all around us. Rap is poetry. Dave is a poet. Tupac is a poet. “They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor.” A single line, balanced and brutal. The repetition. The bluntness. The moral weight carried in plain language. It does exactly what poetry is meant to do. It exposes a truth and leaves it ringing. Loyle Carner is a poet too. He speaks truths that linger on grief, on masculinity, on the awkward tenderness of being human. He writes the way people actually think. Fractured. Circular. Honest. His work proves that poetry does not have to shout to be powerful. It can whisper and still stay with you. This is what I care about. Showing students that poetry is not something sealed in a book or owned by the past. It lives in rhythm, in repetition, in voice. And I care about keeping that alive in myself too. Because once language stops moving, once it stops telling the truth, it becomes decoration. I have no interest in decorating silence.

Being a teacher means knowing you are an example, whether you like it or not. Young people watch how you exist. How you deal with emotion. What you allow yourself to say out loud. I do not think it is honest to ask students to express themselves while modelling emotional silence. Poetry gives me a way to show that feeling can be intelligent, controlled, and still raw. That it can be beautiful without being soft or perfectly rhymed.

I have always known I had a unique voice, and an abundance of things to say. I just did not know what to do with it. For a long time, it felt trapped, loud in my head, nowhere to go. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron helped me to unlock that. Morning pages changed everything. Writing before the world gets to me, before I can censor myself. They are a godsend for my mental health. They show me patterns: the thoughts I repeat when I feel low, the things that quietly make me happy. Unleashing my internal monologue onto a blank page is where my poetry begins.

My work is heavily inspired by Sylvia Plath and Shakespeare. Confessional, but crafted. I struggle to express emotion directly, and poetry lets me say exactly how I feel while still keeping parts of myself private. The imagery is intentional. Meaning is not handed over. It has to be decoded. I love that.

Poetry is a puzzle. Each reader puts it together differently and somehow still finds themselves in it. When I look back at my poems, I can see my life in stages. My state of mind. My growth. The way my voice has changed as I have changed. The chaos of learning how to speak. The control learning when to loosen. I think that is beautiful. To be able to track your becoming. To know that words were not just used to describe survival—they were part of it.

Three years ago, I reached a point where I felt completely landlocked. I was living in a society that left no room for growth, no permission to become anything other than what I already was. I had written about the view from my council estate window more times than I could count. The same streets. The same endings. My art began to dry up because I had nothing new to say. So I packed my entire life into a 23kg suitcase and left. I moved to Cairo, Egypt, a place I had never even set foot in before. Fascinated by Ancient Egypt since childhood, I needed to place myself somewhere older than my frustration, somewhere that reminded me how small and temporary feeling constrained really is. Moving to Egypt was a way of stepping out of an old skin. I needed distance, unfamiliarity, somewhere I could disappear and reassemble. My poetry lives in that space between leaving and becoming, between wanting peace and learning how to exist inside myself without flinching.

written by Kirst Mills-Darrington // Cursdpoems

About Kirst Mills-Darrington: Kirst Mills-Darrington is a poet, teacher, and expat living in Cairo, Egypt. Her work is confessional yet crafted, exploring emotion, memory, and survival through vivid imagery and fragmented honesty. As Head of English at a secondary school, she teaches poetry with respect for tradition while reminding students that language is alive and immediate. Having moved to Cairo to seek distance and growth, her writing inhabits the space between leaving and becoming, capturing the turbulence of life while finding a way to express the inexpressible.

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It’s Piink star, your favourite 17-year-old queer, pan, gender non-confirming, AFAB, neurodiverse, POC, expressive, colourful, young contemporary abstract artist.

Well, that was a lot of labels, wasn’t it? Many people would say BS, and I agree. Wait, hold up! Not in the homophobic, racist, or fascist way, please give me a chance to explain: I’m here to talk about deconstructing social constructs to gain the freedom of self-expression.

People are constricted by labels, expectations, and social norms. What do I mean by this? In today’s world, we are excessively focused on how others perceive us rather than actually living our lives. There’s a difference between surviving and living, and in such a strongly opinionated world, most of us have been on the surviving side of the spectrum. Because the idea of living can only be discovered through freedom: of reflection, acceptance, becoming, and expression.

Now what does this all have to do with gender, sexuality, race, neurodiversity (and much more)? Well, that’s what we’re about to talk about.

Remember how I said I was gender non-confirming, now is that totally true? Although that’s the category people may place me, it’s not who I am. I am a person, I am me. And I don’t believe that the gender defines anyone.

We are all individuals experiencing gender differently, so why must we label everything? (and gender non-conforming being one of them). And why is the gender construct one of the biggest limitations of society? Clearly, it’s a thing and has been for a while. It’s the idea of pink and dresses are feminine, whilst blue and trousers are masculine. And yes, we’ve come a long way, we learned that these ideas are false, we learned about trans and non-binary people, but that progress raises deeper questions. What is gender? Is it what we wear, think, or do?

I’m personally in love with the idea of femininity, but does that make me a girl? No. I also love masculinity, but does that make me a boy? No. And binary thinking already fails intersex people. I’ve explored lots of gender identities and realised that at the end of the day it has nothing to do with who I am on the inside. In my mind we are all drag queens; expressing ourselves through different concepts, not constructs.

As a non-white person, we are often perceived differently. Although there is less racism these days, the ideas of black women being stronger, black people can’t swim, or that white beauty is superior still exists. These are all false illusions and ideas created to control and divide us. With everything currently going on in America and the ICE, and many other countries, we must all remember we are human, freedom is our nature and right, and we cannot let anyone take that away from us.

I want us to allow ourselves and each other to be ourselves freely, but this requires us to look at and question the constructs we’ve been fed from a young age. We need to remember that are free and we don’t have to fit into any construct, binary, restriction and regardless of if we identify with them, they do not define us.

This brings me to talk about image and self-image. Because society loves defining people through visuals: the ideas of beauty, weight, and style. We want to understand everything we see, how we see it, and why, but there’s not an explanation for everything. Everybody looks different, and everybody has a different expression. And what we portray on the outside has very little to do with how we feel or who we are on the inside. Not to mention how others view us: it doesn’t define who we are.

Growing up as dyslexic I felt the need to constantly prove myself, my smartness, and that I can do what others can. At the end of the day, you can do anything you want, whether it’s harder for you or not, it doesn’t define you. There’s a multitude of barriers, boundaries, and challenges for everyone in life, but we can’t allow them to get to us and stop us from being who we are and want to become. “Pay it no mind,” as Marsha P Johnson says. Hope and determination are powerful. You’ve got to allow yourself to hold understanding and patience within yourself.

Our bodies are not our souls, although we can explore and externalise ourselves through waves of expression. And overburdening ourselves with how we think others are perceive us, won’t allow for us to grow from within. Again, we want to live and not survive. We want to live for ourselves, not for (the approval of) others, and in a world so fixated on judgement this will be hard. That’s why we need to explore and find trust within ourselves, respect ourselves for who we are and confidence will be born from within, naturally.

The power of feeling something deeply and expressing it without outside interference is something I hope everyone experiences. Forget who you’re expected to be. Remember who you are. Don’t let doubt — especially doubt imposed by others — control your life. “Ultimately... you can be whoever you want to be, as long as you’re kind to everyone,” says the QUEEN Bimini Bon Boulash “release the beast”.

In conclusion, I believe the world as a whole needs to loosen its grip when it comes to heavy labelling and construction. I came out as lesbian, as omni, and later as pan, and let’s not get into the multitude of genders that I’ve explored. And we should not let labels restrict us and make us forget that we are all only humans. Because, in reality, nothing is fully fixed and nothing is fully binary: we need to allow space for ourselves to grow and express with honesty, and ultimately become free. Piink star signing out.

written by Piink star

edited by Míra Gyalog

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Piink star about piink star: Hi, My name is piink star, I’m a contemporary abstract artist l. I’m 17 years old and have big dreams. My art is about expression and my biggest goal is for people to feel something when they see my art. I want it to go further than just what’s on the page and to speak to people’s souls. To evoke emotion, understanding and deeper connection is my biggest dream. To allow people to question and allow people to express and feel safe, the power of something words cannot produce a feeling only a soul can understand. It’s not about the image but how it makes you feel. It’s the art of humanity, emotion, struggle and hope (something AI could never produce). Open your minds into something deeper and beyond what society allows, real connection, real expression through art.

As a tattoo artist, my craft is a sacred ritual - an interlocked relationship between art and magic. Tattooing, in its essence, has deep roots in Celtic and Gaelic traditions and in ancient times its art served as a form of protection, identity and a link to the spiritual world. Coming from a lineage of generational witches, this heritage is a cornerstone for my practice, allowing me to honor ancient traditions while creating modern meaningful art.

By weaving ancient symbolism and intention into every tattoo design, I tailor each custom piece into a fully personalised, permanently wearable spell - helping anchor the spirit in areas such as protection, self love, and soft transformation. Each design is energetically charged on a plate of corresponding enchanted herbs before it is applied, as the needle meets the skin, the process evolves into a blood ritual. Drawing blood with the needle seals the design with both physical and spiritual essence.

Though both are deeply connected to my intention, my visual style moves fluidly between two distinct expressions - which path we choose is entirely up to the client. Much of my work is rooted in delicate ornamental tattooing, refined line work inspired by magickal alphabets, sigil making, ancient markings and historic motifs. These pieces are precise, and intentional as much as they devotional.

In contrast, my illustrative and imagery based work embraces a far more instinctual language. While my ornamental designs are controlled and architectural, this side of my practice is raw, expressive and unapologetically emotional, giving the impression they have just been torn from a sketchbook and somehow ended up embedded into skin. Alive with movement, texture and shadow, they lean into imperfection. Rather than refinement, they honour honesty. Rather than symmetry, they celebrate expression.

Although the eye may disagree, I do not see these approaches as opposites, but as reflections of the same truth. My work moves between the sacred and the uncontained, the meticulous and the wild - mirroring the way magic itself exists both in structure and surrender. I create as I live: holding reverence for tradition while allowing space for mess, emotion and becoming. Just as I have written in my poetry flash, “ the sacred embers of the feminine mind: beauty, chaos, both combined”, this personal philosophy lives at the very centre of my practice, guiding each tattoo I create. With all of this combined, tattooing becomes not just art, but a living continuation of ritual.

written by Chloê Larissa // Zella tattoo

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about and by Zella tattoo: “Creation has always felt ritualistic to me - a way to clear old energy, invite the new, and understand my inner world, wounds, memories, and becoming. Before tattooing, my artwork was steeped in self-discovery, exploring both light and shadow, just as my witchcraft did. I come from a line of generational witches, these roots are deeply personal and continue to guide my creativity. I am now a tattoo artist based in Tamworth, UK, combining these worlds through “tattooing with intention”. Each piece is magically charged, finalised as a blood ritual that honours the body, the art of tattooing, and knowledge of ritual and energy work.”

The most visually unpleasant thing I've ever seen.

Technically so bad.

You are ruining someone's skin with this crap."

These are some of the comments I got when I started tattooing in my current style. For me, this was a boost of energy to keep going and dig deeper into old engravings and sketches.

It came to me freely.

The more research I did, the more my visual world was changing and expanding. I saw, scanned, and translated tons of art from different ages.

Visions showed me what I want to achieve in tattooing.

I kept seeing with my eyes closed the history of cultural heritage on paper. Written or drawn, from West to East, religious or not, with deeper meaning or without, it did not matter because it all emerged in one shape of understanding. These pieces embrace humankind’s tradition and connection within us all.

The idea of being able to open a portal through eras and cultures empowered me to create more. I discovered that meaning is, and will always be in my work, but it remains subjective. Regardless, the structural and visual connection to the ancients is omnipresent in my craft. I have an endless canvas to engrave my vision of cultural heritage.

During tattooing an armour of understanding is being carved on the bodies of my clients; the body itself then becomes a vessel that carries not only art for visual purposes but also the history of curiosity and connection. The pain clients feel throughout the tattooing process only deepens the experience and seals it within their unique personal history. And those emotions connect me deeply with them and the art itself.

At the end, I am not interested in the surface-level mimicry of the past. I am building a bridge of bone and ink. As the needle meets the skin, the critics' din fades, replaced by the rhythmic pulse of a shared human archive. We are not just wearing art; we are wearing the structural blueprint of our origins and connectivity. The portal remains open, and the engraving continues: one body, one era, one connection at a time.

written by inchaaains

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inchaaains is a tattoo artist based in Warsaw, combining different styles, mainly focused on old engravings and sketches. By creating a tattoo piece from a combination of several various times and styles he is showing people that throughout the years we, as a global society did not change that much. His art does not seek deep understanding. It aims to be structural as a whole and keep the history engraved on the skin of his clients who share a global cultural curiosity.

but not for its inevitability or even what comes after things die. Instead, I am obsessed with the idea of something ephemeral; a transience that exists in such a minute cosmic lapse that shouldn't matter in the larger scheme, and yet we learn to love ephemeral things. The same way you love the flowers that sit in your vase for a week before they start to dry and hang lower and lower every day. The same way you can love a pet, a friend, or your own family for however many years they have been destined to exist on this earth. The same way you love yourself, knowing one day even you will perish, I want you to learn to love ‘Wither’. If it wasn’t obvious already, Wither is a project that explores the embrace of ephemerality, for its natural yet fleeting beauty.

This bag removes the commodity that timelessness offers, teaching consumers to value their objects before they’re gone. Much like living beings, Wither will age, in a tangible story that confronts each stage of life, including the inevitable total decay.

However, when looking at this project from a product design perspective, you start to realize that this idea can run counter to many conventions that modern society has instilled within us. We usually want things to last because we fear losing the emotional connection created around them. It is widely known at this point that the materials in most of the larger fashion labels are used so that products last longer, an idea that, on paper, should contribute to a sustainable future. Ironically, we don’t use these products for as long as they are intended; we get rid of them on a mindless chase for new trends, and leave the old to rot in a mountain of other discarded items that slowly pollute our waters, soil, and everything that feeds off them, which, yes, includes us. This is why I decided to make the Wither bag completely decomposable using an array of hemp-based materials: once the bag is discarded, no waste or impact will be created.

The more I write on these concepts and the intentions behind my work for Wither, the more I realise how personal this project has become to me. Slowly, I’ve noticed aspects of my life and the way in which I engage with fashion changing. I never intended for Wither to be on store shelves because I believe it has always been more effective at telling a story and inspiring people. In the same way it inspired me to consume more ethically and learn to appreciate ephemerality, I hope this article and my work have done that for you, the reader.

‘Wither’, filmed and edited by Alejandro Ramirez, model Míra Gyalog, 2025

Written by Alejandro Ramirez,

Edited by Míra Gyalog

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Alejandro Ramirez is an industrial designer and videographer/editor based in the Netherlands. His work attempts to find the beauty hidden in the unconventional, combining subtle elements with abrasive internet culture, emphasising the chaotic nature of contemporary existence.

Eyes stay.

Not as exact images, but as sensations.

A certain weight. A tension. A warmth.

I paint eyes because they are the only part of people that never really leave me.

The eyes in my paintings are not portraits. They are not meant to belong to someone specific, and yet they all belong to someone. They are fragments of how I remember others, filtered through emotion not than accuracy. When I imagine an eye, the iris is always smaller than it should be, the gaze slightly off. For a long time I thought that meant I was doing something wrong. Now I understand that this distortion is exactly where my work lives.

Surrealism, for me, is not about escaping reality. It’s about allowing memory to behave the way it naturally does: unreliable, and subjective.

The eyes I paint don’t follow anatomical rules because memory doesn’t either — it reshapes things. It exaggerates what mattered and erases what didn’t. In that sense, each eye I create becomes a quiet story, a visual sentence that says: this is how it felt to know you.

When someone looks at one of my paintings, something subtle happens: the eye looks back. There is a moment of recognition that doesn’t need explanation. Viewers often tell me the eyes feel familiar, even if they can’t say why. I like that.

I think that’s why I keep returning to this subject. Eyes allow me to talk about connection without showing faces, to speak about intimacy without defining it.

Eyes sit somewhere between presence and absence, between seeing and being seen.

In the end, painting eyes is my way of holding onto people, moments, and emotions that shaped me. They are not meant to explain anything. They are meant to just exist.

written by Elena Militaru

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Elena Militaru is a surrealist painter based in Barcelona. Her work explores memory, emotion, and perception through eyes that act as stories rather than portraits. She paints from the memories she holds of others, not how they looked, but how they felt. Each eye becomes a fragment of connection, a personal translation of human presence. Her practice moves between painting and storytelling, inviting viewers to slow down, feel, and recognise something familiar within the surreal.

How could you do that to a child?

The two people who were supposed to love me unconditionally abandoned me for no real reason. The anger I feel toward you will live forever in my paintings, and my success will be proof that I’m more than your false ideas of me.

My first relationship reflected the fears you had created in me.

My idea of love is messed up now, but whatever that is, I had it with him.

Four years of beautiful pain.

All to be destroyed by someone who used my vulnerability to fool me into a situation that would hurt me more than anything I’ve previously experienced.

I hate you, and this project reflects the assault of your predatory nature.”

‘All the things I never got to say’ is an ongoing project of mine, where I explore and learn about myself through different means of expression. I’m looking deep within myself to project my feelings into art.

This abstract approach allows me to be as expressive as possible, and the process is equally as crucial to my practice as the final product.

I use the movement of my whole body when I create each painting, I interact with it physically, impulsively, focusing purely on my feelings, rather than thinking about what to do next. My body is taken over by a deep need to express; my mind shuts off as I create, and I don’t remember parts of the process. Everything I undergo during creation is reflected in and contributes to the art pieces.

My art is part of me, and I am part of my art.

You can often observe marks on a page, but behind those lines are deep pain, desperation, and the need to be heard.

Besides expressing myself, I want to give a voice to others through my work.

I wish to offer something similar to how I personally feel connected to Paula Regos’ ‘Dog Woman’ painting. I particularly admire how she’s expressed rage, as well as Tracey Emin. Both of their arts explore ways that call men out and hold them accountable for their actions.

Unfortunately, many experience similar things to what I have — painful things — thus I create with the hope that my work resonates in a way that makes them feel seen.

I aim to simultaneously share my story with the world through art and offer comfort to those who are struggling.

Written by Scarlett Maitland,

Edited by Míra Gyalog

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Scarlett Maitland is a fine art student currently in her final year of university. Her recent work revolves around self-expression and communication, exploring emotional pain and anger through an abstract approach. Her paintings primarily use a range of mixed media, including acrylic paints, charcoal, ink, and gel plate printing. Maitland’s work reflects her personal negative experiences, which are unique to her. Her art aims to speak to everyone individually, offering a safe space to relate and feel heard.

In the 19th century, as automation began to permeate domestic and social environments, technology awakened a strange mixture of euphoria and fear. Devices such as the phonograph or the telegraph seemed almost magical, offering the possibility of communicating with another realm. These machines began to blur the boundaries between the human body and the object, acting with an autonomy that felt almost oracular.

The historical shift planted the seed for my own artistic exploration. I began to understand sound not as something external or representational, like an image, but as something born from within the material world: sound is an invisible energy that vibrates within every object.

Artists such as Oskar Fischinger and John Cage had already explored this idea through optical sound experiments. In the article of the academic Journal of the Society for American Music they suggest that every object in the world holds a latent energy, which can be released through sound.

This way, we are presented with the opportunity to reinterpret the object through sound — it is about touching the object, feeling it, brushing against it, allowing it to emit its own vibration.

In this act of contact, the hidden is revealed.

This perspective resonated deeply with me: each object of the world, no matter how ordinary, holds a hidden vibration that can be released through touch, friction, or resonance.

In my practice, I seek precisely this encounter. When I work with objects — whether electronic devices, metal plates, or handmade instruments — I am not merely aiming to generate sound.

I am trying to listen to the object listening back.

De Natura Sonora / Of Sound Nature, María Hernández Peris, 2024, 7:00 min / mp4

Touching, rubbing, or amplifying its surface becomes a way of entering a dialogue with its internal energy. What emerges is not an imposed melody, but the object’s own voice: irregular, unstable, sometimes harsh, sometimes surprisingly delicate. In that moment, the object stops being passive and becomes an entity with agency, a living node within the acoustic space.

Each vibration is a reminder that the world is alive, resonant, and far more porous than it appears — ultimately, this is the conviction that drives my work. Sound is not merely produced; it is uncovered. And in uncovering it, I discover new ways of relating to matter, to space, and to my own inner landscape.

Written by María Hernández Peris

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María Hernández Peris (Valencia, 2003) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is based on the concept of identity not as a fixed state, but as a series of transformative moments that confront us with the need to redefine ourselves time and again. With a strong interest in acoustics, she explores the bodily and sensory possibilities of sound and video. Currently, her research focuses on electroacoustics, the construction of sound objects, and embodied artistic practices. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to generate immersive experiences that invite the viewer to inhabit the intimate from a collective perspective.

I couldn’t imagine being just one thing or choosing a single direction and walking it forever. Instead, I lived very much in the present, fascinated by change, transformation, and the quiet thrill of becoming. That sense of constant metamorphosis has shaped everything I do, including my work with materials.

Materiality became my language, unconventional materials sit at the heart of my process. I love working with what some might call “trash”, fragments of everyday life that are often dismissed as useless. For me, they’re invitations.

I feel some type of connection to broken and flawed objects, not just because their imperfections make them unique, but because they hold a quiet kind of potential. We live in an era where we discard everything so fast, nothing is made to last, but I like to look at things in a different way. I think we’re all very much like these objects, sometimes we’re just at the wrong place and need someone to believe in us and give us the opportunity to transform into something valuable.

My practice naturally gravitates toward reshaping, breaking, melting, and reinventing, it mirrors how I see life: nothing is fixed, everything can shift, and even the most ordinary things can become something unexpected.

Transforming these objects feels like an act of re-enchantment. When this happens and something disregarded becomes something cherished, it reminds us that value is fluid, subjective, and deeply personal. It challenges the idea that worth is tied to cost, rarity, or perfection.

In jewellery especially, people often cling to traditional notions of value. With my work, I want to encourage them to look beyond the material itself and recognise that the craft, intention, and ideas embedded in a piece hold their own weight and meaning.

My hope is that each piece encourages the wearer to see themselves, and the world around them, through a slightly different lens. That something once ordinary can become a form of expression, a small but powerful statement about perception, transformation, and possibility. Jewellery, in this sense, becomes more than an accessory; it becomes a conversation, a reminder that the world is richer and more layered than it appears.

My work ends up being an extension of myself, a reflection of a worldview built on curiosity rather than certainty, a commitment to discovery, to questioning assumptions, to breaking and rebuilding ideas. It is an ongoing journey of giving new life and embracing the unexpected paths that unfold when we dare to look beyond what is obvious.

written by Sara Valdez

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Sara Valdez is a Portuguese jewellery designer deeply engaged with materiality, working with both reused materials and transformative processes that melt, bend, break, or otherwise alter their original state. Constantly pushing boundaries, she explores new shapes and potential functions in each experiment. Her pieces are deliberately extravagant—wearable sculptures that are always unique. No two works are identical, a distinction she embraces as a statement that separates “artist” from “brand.” She values the power of singular objects, believing there is greater meaning in something only one person can own and wear as an individual expression than in mass-produced, banal pieces.

i know, don’t laugh! i know its “thinker” but this word doesn’t express what i’m trying to convey. i want to say i make art to express and understand the world, but i don’t have a concrete reason for it.

i don’t believe one is necessary

for i am here to live through you and you through me.

welcome all!

to none less than the intimate chamber i quite proudly call my mind, or thoughts, or consciousness… i won’t lie to you, i still have some figuring out to do. welcome!

let me begin with a question, hypothetical, yet answer it if you may: what were you thinking before clicking on this article? maybe you pondered about your breakfast, or about your next activity for the day, or even about tomorrow’s to do list.

do you even remember?

i don’t mean this with a cold tone, but maybe i do.

you see, thoughts are a phenomenon which allow us to feel intensively through a realm of emotions. this is known, i know, but let me remind you of this mechanism. our brain detects a stimuli, whether it be sensorial or thought provoked, the brain process it into short lived reactions which we call emotions. feelings arise from emotions, this is a personal procedure determined by your interactions up to this point so everyone can manifest different feelings of the same emotion.

now, i’m not here to lecture you but i did ask you a question in the beginning, a question i consider the basis to my own philosophical quest, a set of words i form to ask myself constantly: “do you even remember?”

you may be thinking “no of course i don’t remember, remember what exactly?” exactly that! i can put my hand on a fire that this question provoked something in you, a chain of sparking neurons rushing in your brain working together to create the image of that one moment you tried to forget but alas i deemed necessary to bring back. that one situation that lives deep within you but scared to re open because of pain maybe but mainly, discomfort. i caught you! once i asked you to remember something, anything, your immediate reaction was to dig deep. it’s not just you, it’s the twisted psychology behind the nervous system so don’t feel ashamed. but this, everyone, is my art and i, here to please no one but able to investigate from within.

so next time you see one of my pieces and connect with it, it may be uncomfortable. however that is how i know i’m doing somewhat of a good job.

thank you.

written by Alejandra Elizondo

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about Alejandra Elizondo, by her: my intent with art is never unordinary, simply to connect to the most distant parts of you. distorting the female body and composing chaotically is what feels right, it’s my language. whether to give light to what i feel or reproduce experiences, it’s all the same to me as long as it arises a reaction. i believe that to be alive is to feel what is not usually felt, that’s when you truly live.

Something takes over the vessel: a divine madness. Madness? Because I myself don’t demand control over everything, only over what I feel tries to exploit me.

If you sit in quiet for long enough, it shall arrive.

The trees are humming, my fingers move to their rhythm. With closed eyes, how is it that I still see? The glass of lukewarm water you drank on a July afternoon with a pinch of lemon exits your system through the pores of your chest. At the Sun’s command they multiply, those close to one another merge into a stream and are pulled by the gravity of Earth. Alchemy.

Each soul we encounter alchemises us into another manifestation of our selves.

In your presence, I become someone I subconsciously perceive you see in me. We possess a myriad of faces within, you and I, who are being triggered in succession by a diversity of external energies. It’s a facade we don’t force, emerging from the shadows through our sacred encounter. Absurdly blind to ourselves and one another, we allow ourselves to be invented within and without — what is more intimate than that?

My vessel perpetually deforms as it performs, swallowing me through and through, occasionally causing my consciousness to spiral about it — about who I really am — until I wake to realise I was not, to begin with.

To me all is art, all is alchemical, alchemy is art, and art is alchemy. But regarding the truth of the matter, if that’s what you seek, please do not rely on me, nor on another — solely on yourself.

I don’t come to convince. I come to offer something to ruminate on.

When I create, genuinely, I become possessed by it. My body becomes the vessel to allow something to course through it, to manifest. Word follows word as I put something incomprehensible on paper — I do not understand what I write in the moment, I just do. Only later, when this transcendent state eventually leaves. But this force’s greater than me, larger than mind, larger than body. Divine?

Toward it there is no fear inside me — or maybe there is — but a sweet, subtle one that strokes my hair as goosebumps chase each other along the line of my vertebrae. It is one bewildered force I choose to trust blindly without truly understanding why.

So you came to tell me art is certainly not alchemy, my spirit is certainly not art, our exchange is certainly not of sacred nature, everything is not nothing, and nothing is not everything, because according to reason it cannot be.

You say I’m brainwashed by my delusions; I say you’re influenced by a system designed to disassemble that very same trust you condescend. Perhaps I shall stop entertaining this abstraction I’m so inclined to lose myself in, and calcify the ground beneath my statement, so the shame we share for judging each other will quiet.

Art transcends time, space, matter, souls, and all other forms of existence — art is the ultimate act of alchemy. Because if I don’t accommodate this transmutation, my stream becomes restricted, and I madden into imprisoning pirouettes of grey torment.

written by Míra

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Míra Gyalog is an experimental artist, designer and author whose work moves between symbolism, culture, and the inner architecture of the human psyche. Her practice explores identity and collective transformation within contemporary society.