“Horror assaults our senses with relentless precision – the crescendo of a nerve-shredding score, the stomach-dropping revelation in a match-cut, the visceral impact of practical effects. Yet there’s one sensory dimension that remains frustratingly out of reach: the olfactory landscape of fear. We can see the expressionist shadows of Nosferatu, hear Tomie’s seductive whispers, feel the controlled violence vibrating beneath American Psycho’s polished surface – but we can only imagine their distinct bouquets of ancient evil, obsessive beauty, and expensive madness.”
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This article was originally published at Haute Macabre.
When initially living on my own in my early 20’s, I received a mysterious package in the mail during one of the first few weeks in my small apartment. In a plain brown envelope, with no return address and no accompanying note, I found a generic paperback mystery novel. Stuck between the pages between chapters three and four was a faded Polaroid of a man with a ridiculously large, dangling penis. His eyes were Xed out, and someone had drawn a slimy booger hanging from his nose. Ew. Gross. But also: unexpected and intriguing!
For weeks I scoured my brain, asking myself over and over who was this mysterious owner of the enormous wiggly peen? Am I supposed to know him? Who defaced his image? What was the significance of the book in which it was tucked? Why had someone mailed this to me in the first place? I had so many questions! The next month my sister telephoned me and asked if I’d gotten the gift she had sent.
Apparently, she shared, while laughing so hard she could barely breathe, she’d found the book at a used bookstore. When she plucked it from the shelf, the photo tumbled out, and in retrieving it from the floor and taking a closer look, she realized that, with a few modifications, she had the perfect anonymous house-warming gift to send me. She was right. It was weird and dumb and perfect, and to this day we giggle about it. We still don’t know who the naked man is, but we will no doubt be mocking him until we are well in our dotage.
What do Marcel Dzama‘s illustrations have in common with my ludicrous sister and the mysterious dick pic? Well, I’ll get to that.
Marcel Dzama’s works, reminiscent of small, intimate illustrations from vintage story books, are rendered in graphite, pen and ink, watercolor, and root beer wash (a solution he discovered by accident and which can make his drawings look as if they are made in blood). Equal parts macabre and mischievous, frightening and fanciful, these delicately wrought, hybrid characters in the midst of their bizarre and disturbing narratives, present a folksy appearance with an surrealist twist and are underscored by a dark, gallows humor.
Receiving his BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1997, Dzama actively creates across mediums, being a prolific drawer, as well as filmmaker, installation and sculpture artist, musician, costume designer. One might recognize his artwork from the creative output of musicians such as Beck or They Might Be Giants and his darkly whimsical works are highly sought after by Hollywood celebrities such as Brad Pitt and Jim Carey.
Do I care about any of that when my gaze falls upon his flacid, feeble aliens and pretentious tree people and the subversive violence committed by a parade of young women shooting arrows, strangling bats, and threatening their sistren with slingshots? Not particularly.
Dzama’s accolades and renown and star-studded endorsements have nothing to do with why I am drawn to strange pageantry of his work. Cartoonish, nightmarish, and utterly enigmatic, I trace the simple lines of his childish faces with my finger, lose myself in the cloudy shades of his muted color palette, and wonder endlessly about all of it. One reviewer of Marcel Dzama: Sower of Discord, writes that Dzama’s works are a “…a fun-house hell where sinners are condemned to an eternity of enigma.” It is this enigmatic quality to the work that compels me to continue staring, despite the unknowing. To seek out more of his wonderfully peculiar art. And of course…to share the mystery.
One might imagine finding a book of these illustrations in a cardboard box of disorganized children’s toys at your neighbor’s garage sale on a cloudy autumn day. Struck at first by the whimsy of these drawings, you will thumb through the pages, your nostalgia slowly turning to puzzlement. Something seems really off here. Just…not quite right. Kinda fucked up, actually–and you’d love a second opinion.
And you know what? It’s your turn to play anonymous benefactor and you’ve got just the sibling to send it to.
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Originally published at Haute Macabre. I am not sure if this artist is still active, but I didn’t want my writings about them lost!
Not being a particularly crafty or artsy person, most works of art seem like the stuff of genius and magic to me–and the humans whose hands call this artistry into being, magicians of a most brilliant caliber. Their talents and techniques, methods and processes appear as arcane practices; creative rites of which I will never, and perhaps should never glean an understanding.
I have always found the fiber arts a little more accessible, though. Perhaps it is because I am a knitter and have an infinitesimal insight into the creation of each small stitch and how they grow upon one another, how a pattern begins to emerge from a jumble of chaos, how a series of charts on paper eventually transmutes into a silken or woolen, tangible item: a simple pair of mitts to warm ones hands, or perhaps an intricate lace shawl, which over many years becomes a beloved heirloom. Cunning manipulations involving yarn and thread and string, and a pointy stick or two–this art of stitchcraft, though no less magical to me…at least I can unravel a bit of its mystery.
One such dark conjurer of thread and needle-based wizardry is Melbourne-based embroidery artist Adipocere.
Austere, and with a minimum of fuss or florid details, Adipocere’s hand-embroidered imagery on natural linen (and, on occasion, human skin) often features the stark outline of the female form flanked by familiars of the feline, arachnid, lepidopteric and chiropteric variety.
At times this companionship evokes an untroubled, companionable silence, as, for example, woman and puss sit side by side a top the placid plateau of an exhumed human skull. Other pieces portray a more unsettling relationship as a feminine figure in languid repose offers her up her skin for the scarlet scratches of a clowder of black cats. The savage and the serene occupy disquieting space together in these scenes of tender violence.
Some might be inclined apply the terms “morbid” or “macabre” to Adipocere’s works, and while the artist has previously interviewed that his inclinations do sway toward sentiments of that nature, in looking at his own embroidery, he does not see any real darkness.
Perhaps, then, it is not a fascination with the disturbing or unpleasant that Adipocere is necessarily attempting to depict with his stitchery, but rather, a sort of comical-surrealism, stemming from his interests in “counter culture and decay of society”. His more recent work, he notes, focuses more generally on trivializing human identity through rather existentially-nihilistic notions.
“I think most of my fiction tends to root from a certain apathy in that sense.”
And though we have noted the prevalence of feminine figures in his embroidery, we learned that they are “solely indicative of the human component in a sentiment, mostly as a type of anchor point to then play with scale. Any human figure appearing [in his work] is usually portrayed to be much more insignificant than in our society.” With regard to the nude aspect of these figures, Adipocere confides that he is hesitant to embroider clothing, as it’s the largest factor that grounds fictitious narrative to a particular time period or region. As much as much as he might like to embroider Victorian-era dresses or Dark Ages garb, it remains a prevalent self-imposed constraint.
We at Unquiet Things are lovers of cats (ailurophiles, if you’re feeling fancy; “crazy cat person” if we’re telling it like it is) and so of course it was imperative to inquire as to the nature of the shadowy cats that grace so many of Adipocere’s canvases. Are they familiars and friends that live in the artist’s home, or perchance shadowy spirit guides? Indulging our curiosity, Adipocere admits that these beloved creatures appear for many reasons and that cats are “terribly important” to his personal well-being (hear hear!) but that being said, he sadly does not live with any, and that maybe he is “subconsciously filling that void.”
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
This article was originally published at Haute Macabre.
As the tale goes, jeweler and sculptor of contemporary memento mori Julia deVille, apprenticing under a handful of the greatest and most formidable masters ever known, honed and refined her talismanic skills over the course of several centuries and quietly emerged from her draconian education in the mid-19th century as a master alchemist–with soul almost all intact!
A fanciful origin story perhaps, but one only need briefly glimpse her extraordinary work to fast believe that, as the fabled records note, Queen Victoria did indeed employ deVille as her principal goldsmith, becoming both her supporter and beloved friend. Rumors whisper that with the her majesty’s patronage, deVille was able to create “the most exceptional and heartbreaking regalia” and together, they made mourning a fashionable devotional trend.
It is said that, over the course of time, deVille continued to cultivate her skills and unceasingly reinvented her approach, but however many millennia pass, and whether the medium is jet, obsidian, precious stones, or precious creatures, each jewel has a story to tell, and, by deVille’s hand–very amulet and adornment she creates is first built upon a foundation of utmost love.
And now, dear readers, the facts as they are known to this scholar: Julia deVille’s work is informed by a fascination with the acceptance of death expressed in memento mori jewelry of the 15th to 18th centuries and Victorian Mourning jewelry. Characterized by the use of memento mori symbology from past eras, as well as the methods the Victorians used to sentimentalize death with adornment, deVille uses traditional precious and semi-precious metals and gems, and (on occasion) materials that were once living, such as jet, human hair and taxidermy.
In examining our mortality, her work incorporates motifs that “encourage viewers and wearers to identify with their own fate and challenge a prevalent culture that obsessively plans the future: forget an unknowable tomorrow and instead embrace the present.”
deVille studied at Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE and has, in addition to those credentials, completed a taxidermy mentorship. Her haunting works are characterized by the elegant combination of these fields and ideas, and has been extensively exhibited in Australia as well as in the USA and Europe.
She employs taxidermy as a celebration of of life and sees it as the preservation of something fragile and beautiful; “…my work celebrates the preciousness of life and the power of each and every life,” the artist declares.
And such wondrous celebrations they are! A winsome piglet, swaddled in lace and beads sits sweetly atop a bed of feathers. A gothly mummified feline reclines in dark dignity; a luminous, diamond encrusted corvid skull shimmers and sparkles in avian afterlife. But do not fret, sensitive souls–deVille, a vegan, animal lover, and animal rights champion who ethically sources her materials, further notes on her website, “no sentient (or sapient) beings were harmed for the making of these works.”
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Back in 2008, while I was still finding my voice with a modest little blog chronicling my cooking experiments and knitting projects, I spent countless hours as a devoted reader of other people’s online worlds. Those were the golden days of blogging, when each site felt like discovering someone’s secret diary left open on a cafe table. Though I mainly haunted the corners where home cooks shared their Rancho Gordo bean techniques and no-knead bread recipes, or where I envied the knitters trotting off to Rhinebeck, other blogging spheres existed in parallel – fashion blogs like Sea of Shoes, where a visionary teenage fashion enthusiast transformed vintage finds into fantastic narratives that felt more like glamourous fairy tales than outfit posts.
In early 2024, long after my own writing had evolved from those cozy domestic dispatches into explorations of art and the artfully macabre, I stumbled upon Jane Dashley’s paintings on Instagram. At first, I didn’t realize it was the same Jane as that marvelous fashion blogger! But the jolt of recognition in terms of the artwork was immediate and electric – here was a perfect embodiment of my very favorite vibe, what scholar and mystic Pam Grossman describes as “demented joy” – that quality of being “exuberant without being insufferably cheery, twisted but not cruel, bright but with undercurrents of gravity and shadow.”
It’s a concept that deeply resonates with my own aesthetic sensibilities – that space where childlike wonder collides with adult anxieties to create something electric and strange. In her work, I found this manifest in canvases teeming with impish devils attending formal balls and moonlit bacchanals that spark that same jubilant sense of ecstatic absurdity that I’m always seeking in art. It exists in that delirious twilight where sweetness sours slightly sinister, where lobsters attend midnight revels, bears take tea with unlikely companions, and the devil’s always in the details. Each painting feels like a folkloric postcard from the enchanted midnight woodlands of a surrealist snow globe brimming with the best and weirdest nursery rhymes. In short, it makes me want to dance a madcap jig and scream with delight!
I recently had the chance to speak with Jane about her journey from fashion blogger to painter and co-founder of the fragrance venture Fragraphilia. We delved into the fever-dream world of her canvases, where good and evil play dress-up and switch roles with gleeful abandon, where protective spirits keep watch while offering cake and ice cream sundaes, and devilry and revelry find their faces in furry friends.
I love this photo because it looks like Jane is wearing the most fabulous watermelon fascinator.
Through Sea of Shoes, during the golden age of fashion blogging, you cultivated an extraordinary aesthetic vision – your sophisticated, avant-garde style choices and artful curation created something that transcended traditional fashion documentation. Now, you’re channeling that same transformative sensibility and expressing this distinctive vision into paintings that enchant and beguile. Could you talk about this evolution? How has your eye for the extraordinary – whether in vintage couture or painted dreamscapes – continued to develop and surprise you across these different mediums?
That is so kind of you to say! Thank you so much. I think what drew me to blogging back in the day was a really free-form outlet of expression. I used to do blog posts taping stuff together from magazines and drawing on notebook paper. I could write about anything I wanted and I really did. Besides fashion, I wrote about music and movies and toys I collected, and even my favorite types of fish.As blogging progressed into more of a “job” and the magic of the original blogging days started to dull, I just wasn’t having a lot of fun anymore. But I was also becoming an adult, and I think I just accepted that my job was less fun because that’s what growing up meant. So I kept on for a while, but growing more disenchanted with the passing of time.
Luckily, the pandemic gave me the push to turn the art I was already making into a full-time thing. It’s been the most amazing shift, I never knew I could have this much fun. Ironically, as a working artist and frazzled mother of a toddler, I have very few opportunities to dress up these days. I still definitely see the crossover between my sense of fashion and what I bring up when I am creating a painting. It all comes from the same place, and it’s interesting to see how that plays out over the years.
There’s something delightfully feverish about your work, its whimsical creatures and anthropomorphic animals in vibrant dreamscapes of bacchanals and bonfire nights – you describe it as ‘happiness bordering on delirium.’ How do you achieve this particular emotional frequency in your pieces, and what state of mind are you typically in while creating?
I have a hysterical need to be making as much work as possible at all times. I just counted, and I made 82 finished paintings last year, which does feel like a lot for a year that involved a move and taking care of a toddler. I think my obsession with the work I’m creating, as well as a wolfish desire to make as much of it as I possibly can, contribute to the feverish frequency you’re picking up on! I work on many paintings at once. My notebooks are filled with multiple penciled-in squares that contain very hastily rendered painting ideas, almost like a swatch book of upholstery fabric.
Usually, I have some piece of media going on in the background while I work, be it a movie or an album or an audiobook and I like to listen to them in loops. I listened to the Thandie Newton narration of Jane Eyre four times in the last year. I’ve been playing Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee over and over. I like getting into a really obsessive and repetitive energy, and I think it’s a form of gratitude to wring everything you can from other art that influences you.
Your work seems to draw from timeless storytelling traditions – from folklore and fairy tales to the profound magic of Studio Ghibli films, even reimagining classical narratives like Swan Lake – where ordinary moments can suddenly open into something extraordinary, where boundaries between mundane and magical dissolve. How do these narrative traditions influence the way you think about enchantment and possibility in your own work?
I think I have a very typical girl obsession with fairy tales, especially coming from a household of sisters. You grow up hearing them, and they enchant you while also instructing you on what you should want and usually about how you must suffer to get it. And then you actually come of age, and you grow hair, and you start bleeding, and you’re gripped with pain, and you’re kind of repulsed but compelled toward boys and men. It’s so awful and hilarious. But you still love those goddamn fairy tales! Luckily there’s Angela Carter. I guess many of the origins of fairytales are just women trying to make sense of the horrible things that have happened to them. I think this is healthy and wonderful, and playing into these narratives makes me feel connected to the lineage of humanity.
Your paintings seem to exist in an interconnected dream world populated by recurring characters – cats and lobsters, bunnies and teddy bears, protective magical creatures alongside mischievous ones like your signature devil in their ballgown. Could you tell us about how this personal mythology evolved and what these figures represent in your creative universe?
I grew up surrounded by animals, my mom was a big dog rescue person so we always had 5-10 dogs in the house at once. We had a bull mastiff wander into our garage one random day, and ever since then, my mom has been part of bull mastiff rescue groups. They are such magnificent dogs. I loved to draw their beautiful strong limbs and toenails, I got interested in animal shapes this way. I also had a black cat as an imaginary friend/inner guiding voice until I was way too old to admit, which probably explains a lot of my work. My earliest memories are dreams I had of large freshwater fish, such as the Amazonian river fish, the Arapaima. I have a LOT of weird animal hang-ups that would take me a long time to detail, and I would say they are all the impetus for almost all of my work.
Days before I gave birth to my son, I wasn’t sleeping well and I stayed up painting this masked tiger figure that just came to my imagination. I felt like this tiger captured the spirit of my son and it felt like a kind of a creative spirit labor that took place before any kind of actual birth labor. I always knew that tiger would represent my son to me. And what’s weird is that the toy my son became most attached to early on is a toy tiger! He has a stuffed toy tiger that does absolutely everything with us, and he gravitated to it all on his own. I spend all day every day talking to this toy tiger with my son. It wigs me out sometimes!
In your work, there’s often a fascinating interplay between light and shadow – literal and metaphorical. Your celebrations have an edge of wildness, your brightest pieces pulse with an almost supernatural energy. You’ve spoken about darkness as a space where we “tune in, maybe better than we have ever tuned in before.” How do you think about the role of darkness in your work – not just as an aesthetic choice, but as a way of seeing or understanding?
People always talk about the darkness in my work, and sometimes, I have a really hard time seeing it because I have so much fun making it.Then I get honest with myself and I have to admit that I’ve painted like, carcasses and bunnies being mauled in pretty recent memory. Right now, I am painting naked horny fairy women chasing hairy beasts. To me, it’s so second nature to bring in aspects of fear and death because that’s life. I think, as children, we have a natural compulsion towards darkness because we’re trying to make sense of all the fears we can’t understand yet. Children integrate darkness into their play and imaginary worlds so that they can learn to cope with it later on. Maybe I’m still doing that.
I’m shamelessly nosy about artists’ creative spaces! Could you invite us into your studio – what does your workspace look like, what are your must-have tools and materials, and do you have any particular rituals or routines when you’re creating?
Last year, we bought a home with windows and a pretty big garage added to it. It’s been my studio, and every day, I could kiss the ground because I’m so grateful to have so much space to work. I work best when I have a lot going on at once. My studio is crammed with many works in progress and lots of notes taped to the wall. I have two tables in the middle, one where I do small work or admin stuff and one where I can pack paintings or for a friend to come to work alongside me in my studio. I do my large work against the walls. I work almost every night, and I play music and always keep a stash of pimento cheese in my freezer to keep my motivation up!
Can you tell us about a particular piece that marked a significant evolution or breakthrough in your artistic journey?
Christmasland is a painting I did in 2022, and upon its completion, I was very pleased with the level of weirdness it achieved. The stare of the cat’s eyes holds something that feels like a part of myself. I felt maybe it was too weird for other people to like, but when I shared it on Twitter, it got a huge response, and I gained a whole new audience. I’m still very grateful for this experience, it gives me hope to this day when I try something that feels too awkward or wonky and I feel the temptation to abandon it. I remember Christmasland!
Let’s talk about your artistic lineage – what were the formative experiences or artworks that shaped your creative vision when you were starting out? Who are the artists, past or present, that you feel in conversation with?
I come from a very creative family; my mom, my aunt, and my grandma are all artists in some way. Early on in my life, and I couldn’t say when, I had a concept of what folk and outsider art was. My grandma was really into buying and selling antiques back in the day and she was always showing me art or movies when I stayed at her house. She liked John Waters movies and outsider art a lot. She was definitely not a normal grandma. I remember being 6 or 7 years old and being taken on a school field trip to the Dallas Art Museum and thinking to myself that while I appreciated the skill of these very stiff and formal American landscape paintings we were being taken to see, it just didn’t excite me like the paintings in the folk art books I would look at. Art books were a big thing in my life early on, I was lucky to have parents that nurtured what they saw that I loved. So, I was interested in this tension between what I was being told “good art” was and the art that actually excited me. Outsider art, folk art, whatever you want to call it…all of the stuff I liked when I was a teenager is still the best stuff to me. I have books on Nellie Mae Rowe and Joseph Yoakum that I bought when I was 16 years old that I look at all the time. I also remember being very gripped by the painting “Sitting on a Bench with Border” by Rose Wylie and I probably saw it around the time it was done, 2007. I printed it out on my computer and just stared at it constantly. Rose’s work was a huge shift for me when I first saw it, and she is still one of my biggest inspirations.
You and your husband Jeff, created Fragraphilia – a personal journal, review site, and podcast celebrating the artistry of niche perfumery. Could you share a bit about your history with scent and how this sensory world has evolved alongside your visual art? How do you find these different forms of artistic expression – the visible world of your paintings and the invisible landscapes of fragrance – informing and enriching each other?
I really never thought I was a perfume person until we got a Serge Lutens counter here in Dallas. I grew up in the era of Victoria’s Secret body sprays, which turned me off of perfume for the most part. Then, when I smelled Serge Lutens for the first time, my world shifted. I had never thought perfume could be so expressive. I want to say my first Serge bottle was Daim Blond, but for years, I wore Fille en Anguilles as my one and only perfume. My husband was a niche fragrance guy before we met, which I guess was pretty unusual back in those days.
Having a frag-head husband is really fun, especially since our tastes are nearly the same. Lately both work and childrearing take up a lot of the time that my husband and I used to have just for each other, so scent is a special thing that keeps us connected throughout the day. We always keep each other abreast of what scents we’re wearing throughout the day and talk about the wearing experience. The studio is a very lonely place, especially on dark, long nights, and my fragrance is often the only company I keep in there. It can absolutely set the tone for a painting session. I have just blind-bought Reve d’Ossian on your recommendation and I absolutely intend to use it as a creative guide in a new series of work. I never blind buy, I am so excited to be taken on this journey. Thank you for the inspiration!’
I’m unabashedly nosy about all the little things that bring joy and delight to creative people’s lives! Would you share some current favorites – this could be anything at all, from your perfect morning beverage to a holy grail skincare product to the coziest painting socks to whatever show you’re binge-watching right now. What small pleasures are making your days a bit more magical?
This year, I gave myself the gift of a History Hit subscription, and I can’t stop telling everyone how great it is. It’s educational but it is also an escape to a different time. I really like the show Gone Medieval and Not Just the Tudors. They also do these great documentaries you can watch on their app where they take you on tours of castles and stuff like that. I keep them playing while I work. I also love audiobook performances. One I loved last year was Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian as read by John Pirhalla. It’s western folk horror, and I loved what the audiobook performance added to the story. I listened to it a few times in a row. Lately, I’ve done a lot of Edith Wharton audiobooks, too.
Your work often feels like it exists in its own dreamy universe, but I’d love to know what inspires you in the real world – do you have favorite places you visit for inspiration, certain times of day when ideas come to you, or particular environments that spark your creativity?
My happy place is definitely Half Price Books. We are lucky to have the flagship location here in Dallas. It’s very calming, and I like the dig. The art book selection is not as good as it used to be, sadly. Before the pandemic, I used to find the most insane rare books in their art collection, no matter how frequently I went. I think that they started culling some of the good ones and selling them online in recent years. I still really like going there when I need inspiration. I started collecting children’s books as a teenager, and I love that I have an excuse to buy even more now that I’m a mom. You can find great old ones that are out of print at Half Price! I hear whispers they may open a tiki bar inside of the flagship. That would basically be heaven on earth for me.
You’ve built these remarkable creative worlds – through fashion, through painting, through fragrance – each one distinct but somehow connected by your distinctive vision. What have you learned about following your creative instincts across these different territories? What would you share with others who feel drawn to explore multiple forms of artistic expression?
I can see now that having played in so many fields of creativity, all of it matters. Every little sketch or every little note you wrote to yourself or every song or movie you’ve fallen in love with. And because of that, it’s so important to honor those fragile beginnings. It doesn’t matter how far into your artistic journey you are, whenever you are creating anything, there will be parts that just feel horrible. Often, the beginning or the near-completion point of a project brings on abject misery and despair. Don’t throw away your work! You have to be kind to yourself and honor the first spark of inspiration you felt and see it through or save it for some other time. I often come back to years-old ideas or inspirations. It’s so important to save everything and to treat the artifacts of your creative labors with tender love and care. It takes work to cultivate, most artists have fragile egos and are their own worst critics. Even if the time isn’t right for an idea at the moment, it will come back around, so save all of your notebooks and sketches.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Started out my year with a colonoscopy and a mammogram! Asked for a dermatologist referral for a weird lump on my forehead! Got my annual tarot reading! Completely overhauled my hair! We are off to a rollicking start.
Stories & Sounds
⟡ Reading: I just finished Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang and wowowow – this book is an exhilarating, terrifying examination of art and agency and trauma and what is real and who is real and it absolutely consumed me. It’s a deeply intense narrative about two artists, Enka and Mathilde, whose friendship spirals into an extraordinary meditation on creativity, obsession, and the boundaries between people. Huang is doing something so original and provocative that I’m not sure any other contemporary writer is exploring these territories with such depth and insight. This is the kind of novel that will set your brain on fire. If you loved Natural Beauty and were eagerly anticipating Huang’s next move, this novel will exceed every expectation. See above for the other 13 books I read last month.
⟡ Watching: This is a tough one. I don’t watch much of anything anymore. I watched one episode of Severance’s second season, and a bit of Dandadan with Yvan, but I can’t be bothered to care about much of any of it for whatever reason.
Hearth & Home
⟡ I saw a video on YouTube for this zuppa Etrusca and was so inspired I had to make my own version of it. I say “my own version,” not because I thought I could put a better spin on it, but I wanted to work with the ingredients I had on hand, which meant a lot of swaps and substitutions. It was delicious anyway!
⟡ Ývan found a new-to-us little farmer’s market a few weekends ago, and we were pretty excited when we finally got to stop by Eartha’s Farm & Market. We get absurdly excited about shopping for vegetables! It was small but mighty selection and we came away with some fun things to experiment with. I’m plugging along, trying to modify my eating, low sodium, tragic lack of Cheetos, etc., and while I can’t call these open-faced grilled cheese, mustard, and Chinese broccoli sammies on home-made sourdough “healthy,” exactly, they were a lovely treat!
⟡ At the aforementioned doctor’s visit, we also talked about me finally taking an antidepressant, which at nearing 50, I realize I should have been open to half a lifetime ago. Yes, it is true–I have been out here, “just raw-dogging life all this time,” as someone recently commented when I shared this new development. It’s been two weeks now that I’ve been on generic Lexapro and I am still not cured, ha.
Anyway, I guess the doctor thinks she knows her stuff, but I prescribed myself some new cookbooks. In addition to Snacking Bakes and Ottolenghi’s new cookbook, I have Justine Doiron’s debut cookbook from the library right now, and there is so much veggie-centric inspiration in there! I might have to grab a copy of that one, too. She uses a lot of “crispy quinoa” in her recipes, and that sounds like something that might actually make me like that stupid, stupid quinoa.
Current Enchantments & Little Lights
⟡ Completely enchanted with artist David Schmitt’s wonderfully human, boldly magical works!
⟡ Saturday morning coffee adventures! The monkey’s face demanded that I switch up my Saturday routine, which had previously consisted of lounging around and drinking coffee. We can get coffee all over this town, so why not make a little treasure hunt of finding all the best places? This is where farmer’s market visits, arboretum strolls, and other such things come in. I want to do something with our morning that doesn’t necessarily involve shopping or eating, but I don’t have many ideas… especially as the FL weather is starting to heat up again. Any and all thoughts and suggestions are appreciated!
⟡ Making dates with new friends! We met up with some friends last weekend to go to a yearly event at a local brewery, and we’re trying to figure out a time that we can have them over for a board game afternoon. Because of the way I am, I guess, I always dread going out and doing things with people, and if I had to pin down reasons for this, I think it’s got a lot to do with how I get nervous and clam up. When I am forced to talk with people minus the buffer of time + thought that writing affords me, I’m always worried I offer a subpar experience of interaction with me. I am just better and more interesting when I am writing! In person, I feel like I might be a bit of a let-down. But after a lifetime of squirreling myself away and being a hermit, sometimes I just long to feel NORMAL around people, and I am never gonna get there if I don’t show my face in public and talk to folks.
⟡ A literal little light, as per this section’s title: we’ve decided to keep our Christmas lights up in our living room year-round. Maybe it looks a little Stranger Things, season one, but I don’t care!
⟡ The best sleeping set ever: I think Universal Standard advertises the Isadora pants & top as a “lounge set,” but I use them as pajamas, and they are so nice!
⟡ I very rarely recommend a fragrance if I don’t have a review to accompany it, but right now, I have two, and you will just have to trust me: Oxomoco from Arcana Wildcraft and Poppies and Lupine from BPAL. I’ll eventually write up some thoughts on the both of them, but for now, just know that they are Very Good.
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There’s a particular kind of existential dread that blooms when small systems inexplicably fail – distinct from the larger dread that’s been hanging over us these past months as we watch our democracy strain and buckle.
When my blog’s email notifications stop working, it feels almost absurd to be rattled by such a privileged problem while our fundamental rights are under threat. And yet, these small failures still unsettle me deeply. I feel a familiar twist of anxiety when I need to reach out for help, knowing I’m asking someone to pause their day to untangle what is, for them, probably a simple fix. It’s not so much about the broken feature – it’s about feeling simultaneously grateful for and guilty about needing help with something I should perhaps understand better, but don’t.
The postal service triggers a similar feeling. Some days, maybe 2-3 times a month, our mail carrier simply doesn’t show up. My outgoing letters sit in the mailbox until dusk, like awkward guests at a party where the host never arrived. It happens frequently enough to be a pattern, but irregularly enough that I can never quite prepare for it. The anticipation builds throughout the day – surely they’re just running late? – until evening falls, and I have to accept that today just isn’t a mail day, for reasons I’ll never understand. Another tiny inconvenience that shouldn’t matter, not when there are people fighting for their very existence.
It starts small – an apologetic message to web support, again, or watching my outgoing Pango packages sit untouched hour after hour. But it spirals quickly into something darker. If I can’t trust email to email or mail to mail, what else might suddenly stop working? The silent agreements that keep society functioning? When massive systemic threats feel overwhelming and impossible to process, we often redirect our anxiety toward smaller, more manageable problems. The broken blog notifications become a proxy target for larger fears we can’t fully face. I find myself wondering if I’m already so on edge that it only takes a small thing like this to send me toppling into the void.
Maybe that’s why these small glitches hit so hard right now – they’re tangible, immediate problems I can laser focus and hyper fixate on, even if I can’t fix them. They’re safer to spiral about than the bigger terrors looming on the horizon. Every failed notification or missing mail day becomes a focal point for anxiety that’s really about something much larger and more frightening. It’s about the sudden, visceral reminder that everything I consider solid is actually balanced on an endless series of assumptions and dependencies. Every time my blog’s notifications fail, I’m confronted with how much of my world I take for granted until it stops working, how much I don’t understand about the systems I rely on every single day.
Maybe the weirdest part isn’t just carrying the knowledge that everything could break – it’s wondering when I’ll break, too. When these small systems fail, they become reminders of my own fragility. Am I just another system waiting to malfunction? Will I one day stop performing basic tasks, becoming as unknowable and unreliable as the services I depend on? There’s something darkly fitting about fixating on broken notifications while democracy crumbles – both feel like warnings about how easily systems can fail, from the smallest email service to the largest institutions to my own mind and body.
And yet, somehow, most of the time, it all works – through the quiet competence of others, through systems I don’t understand, through my own continued functioning. Until it doesn’t.
Tell me about the systems in your life – big or small – that become lightning rods for larger fears when they break.
Every month, either according to mood or whim or random theme, I gather a few bottles of perfume from my cupboard with the intent to spend the month absolutely marinating in them. Hence, the Monthly Marinade!
Lately, I have been craving incense and those related dark, smoky, resinous vibes, so here’s the gang I conjured forth for February. If you are interested in full reviews of each one, you can read about it over on my Patreon today.
(You must be a member to read it, but even members at the free tier can access it!)
Spoiler alert! One of these fragrances is the February scent for my Aromatic Angel patrons, who receive a handwritten and scented note card in the mail from me every month!
Lilyan Tashman in the Perfume Bottle Costume Designed by Erté for the lost Silent Film “Bright Lights” MGM (1925)
Jorum Studio’s Gorseland is a convergence of many paths of light blazing through the borderlands between cultivated and wild, where neon-bright blooms stun with their electric intensity. While I spend my days mostly indoors, I’ve traveled countless wild paths through spellbinding nature writer Robert MacFarlane’s writing, where his luminous prose captures the poetry of wild places, showing how ancient ways and old growth persist alongside us, part of our daily world rather than separate from it. This scent unfolds like one of these vicarious journeys: sharp-edged and biting in the high places, then deepening to a piercing sourness in the shadows of valley-bottom herbs. The shock of fluorescent petals never quite settles as you climb higher, maintaining their strange luminosity even as shoots twist upward with their raw, cutting brightness. Eventually, softer notes emerge – the apple-sweet fluff of chamomile and grassy vanilla whispers of woodruff – like finding an unexpected meadow after a steep climb. In this scent, the air crackles with the voltage of growing things, refusing our attempts at categorization – too bright, too fierce, too alive to be contained.
Kintsugi Luna. Picture this: the devil girl from Mars levels her cotton candy raygun, and the blast floats eternally in zero gravity. Each crystalline sugar cloud drifts through stratospheric winds, spun and respun by ionized air. The atmosphere crackles plasma-charged, with impossible gamma rays that smell like electricity and stardust. This is pure space candy – confectionery untethered in the cosmic expanse, sugar crystals forming in streams of light. Sweet particles scatter like nebulae, catching starlight and spreading ever outward, a candyfloss cosmos; glittering, gossamer, and galactic.
Alchemy + Hyde no. 4 is a scent that somehow captures the essence of inherited wisdom – like old folk songs passed down through generations, carrying both the comfort of familiar melodies and the half-forgotten warnings woven between their verses. It opens with wintergreen’s silvery, shivery edge, sharp as a grandmother’s songs about doors best not opened, twice sung for blessing, sung thrice for a curse. The sweetness comes later, like memories traded at crossroads: green-bright cardamom and tonka bean’s honeyed hay bartered for safe passage, amber collecting in pools like sun-caught resin where old gods left their footprints in the mud. Oud’s leathered darkness and milky sandalwood whisper in voices from before the moon devoured the sun, when even memory’s perfume knew older tales. It settles finally into something almost familiar, the way scattered pages from a book of old folk songs might rearrange themselves into a lullaby, humming softly against your skin.
Heal the Way is a collaboration between Snif and Alex Elle, and I’ve been wracking my brains trying to come up with something creative or interesting to say about this scent. Usually, I love diving deep into a fragrance, weaving dreams and memories into the description, finding those strange and perfect metaphors that capture not just how something smells but how it makes you feel. Different aspects of this scent seem to appear to and appeal to different people – some are catching the nuttiness, others are picking up on the palo santo, while to me it smells exactly like a can of vanilla frosting. Yet we’re all arriving at the same emotional destination: comfort. After two weeks of being ripped from my introverted little sanctuary to spend every waking moment with Yvan’s family for the holidays, I have been crabby and frazzled, and I’ve found myself instinctively reaching for this one. It’s fluffy, cozy, creamy comfort that somehow manages to stay light and airy rather than cloying, and despite being fundamentally a vanilla scent, it never tips over into grossly tooth-aching sweetness. The longer it wears, though, I’m catching more nuances – that lush, pillowy marshmallow frosting eases into warm, ambery-woody musk the longer it wears. Is it groundbreaking? No? Have I reinvented the wheel with this review? Sadly, also no. But maybe there’s value in collective experience – in many voices confirming that yes, sometimes what you need isn’t a complex artistic statement, but just this simple comfort, this quiet permission to rest.
Sweet Ash, another one from Snif, is the sweatpants of fragrances—the kind you reach for on those days when comfort is key. Like shedding the day’s roughness and sinking into something worn soft. As if fleecy, elastic-waisted comfort could hold memories of secluded landscapes and long, winding paths. A bit of wilderness, a chip of bark, a prickle of pine needles, a frill of moss, pressed and preserved, wrapped in a vanilla-scented hankie, tucked deep in a pocket where it’s been gathering warmth and memory. It’s the fragrance for a morning spent entirely indoors, sunlight filtering through half-closed curtains, creating a soft haze…with that scrap of woodland folded and kept close. This is what you spray on when you’re curled up on the sofa, feet tucked underneath you, a favorite mug of coffee steaming nearby, a collected volume of windswept travelers’ borderland wanderings balanced on your knee—a quiet companion to those moments of absolute stillness, of being completely at ease, while only the characters in books are adventuring.
Immortal Perfume Queen of Night Though Queen of the Night draws inspiration from the Countess de Castiglione, in my imagination, it constructs a dream world where the gilded beauty of 18th-century rooms coexists with decay and dereliction – Marie Antoinette’s ashtray as Turbeville might have found it, forgotten in some dust-shrouded chamber of Versailles, where moth-eaten velvet curtains hang heavy with decades of tobacco smoke. Here, sugared almonds and crumbling macarons lie crushed into tobacco ash, and leather gloves rest carelessly beside crystal ashtrays clouded with time. The florals drift through like pressed flowers discovered between the pages of centuries-old letters, and abandoned crystal coupes veil their honey-sweetened whiskey stains beneath sheets of dust. The sweetness and smoke weave together in a sense of isolation and romanticism frozen in time, rustling and sighing with the ghosts of lost revelries through those long-waiting twilight rooms where memory crumbles into ruin and withered autumn leaves.
Lvnea Ronds de Sorcièreis an impossible rose: not blooming, not remembered, not real. Soil dreaming itself into petal-shape, a spectral geometry of what cannot be. No rose exists here—and yet. The scent traces the negative space of a flower, its phantom outline pressed between layers of mud and membrane and memory. Things in the dirt whisper beneath—shadows of dark roots and old bones, beetle carapaces, the soft click of mandibles against stone. Churning earth under an impossible weight. Petrichor trembles at the edges, a breath caught between forgetting and never having arrived at the start. The illusory rose dies. Mushrooms rise from its void, soft-fisted and eyeless, shouldering aside the last whispers of petal and memory. Here, in the dark breathing of soil, fungal threads weave their own cartography. No mourning: just the unrepentant pulse of growth, of things that emerge from darkness with the quiet violence of becoming.
This Strawberry Shortcake X Scentbird collaboration is probably not something that would ever have been on my radar, let alone something I would have purchased for myself. But as “olfactory revenge” because I bought myself something for Christmas that my Best Friend had intended to get me–they sent me this instead. Here are some thoughts…
The costume I imagined was undoubtedly scratchy, sticky polyester performance—a bright explosion of red and pink, with a vinyl jumpsuit that caught light like a light-up toy’s colorful, pixelated glow. A blow mold mask perched atop, its plastic curves capturing some uncanny cartoon essence, and a bonnet that framed everything in soft ruffles. The fabric catching dust motes in an afternoon sunbeam with that particular vintage fabric smell that hints at something slightly worn and not necessarily anytime recently. A child transformed into a living cartoon, all synthetic shine and determined imagination where reality fell short. If that visual—this moment that never actually existed—were a Polaroid half-developed, a scratch-and-sniff sticker, it would be pure wish-fulfillment: not the vivid cartoon, not the plastic toy’s sharp edges, but tender, wistful third thing. Soft candied undertones swirled into the frothy berry cereal milk pooling at the bottom of your favorite bowl, the one that fits perfectly in your little hands. Soft pastry cream pooling beneath pale pink strawberry syrup, faded, translucent, and condensed milk warming against skin. And at the very center, a tiny ache—for the costume I never wore, the moment that was only ever a desperately dear, whole-hearted wish. I was expecting something tooth-achingly sweet, and this is only just shy of that. What I didn’t expect was how relentlessly charming it would be.
Stora Skuggan’s Pine is definitely pine: bark-rough, evergreen-needled, mineral-edged, and windswept. But beneath its damp-sapped woodland weight is …a weird, savory surprise? Picture it: a late afternoon light filters through pine branches, thick and amber-green. The forest closes in—not a real forest, but a micro-memory invented just for this moment. My chihuahua, also a figment of my imagination, darts between tree trunks, a teacup blur of muscle and movement. The air is pure, bracing conifer at first. Sharp. Resinous. Each breath knifes my lungs, cold and green. The trees rustle, and a weird, whistling wind carries an unexpected scent. Corn chips, the warm, salty smell of a dog’s toe beans. My little pupper bursts from a thicket, tail wild, dirt-smeared, slightly feral. In his mouth: a raven’s skeleton. Bleached bone, delicate as paper. The forest seems to pause. I grab him to me and hold his small, trembling body close. He drops the fragile corpse at my feet. The dark branches fold behind us, dense and silent.
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I am currently ensorcelled by Petah Coyne’sdarkly romantic sculptures, where wax, silk flowers, and taxidermy birds transform into ethereal, baroque-like forms. Her pieces conjure the atmosphere of those moments in gothic paperbacks where the heroine discovers the truth isn’t in the attic after all, but blooming madly in plain sight in the conservatory. Massive chandeliers of black flowers drip with wax, their surfaces catching light in unexpected ways, like something dredged up from the depths but somehow still gleaming.
Untitled #1378 (Zelda Fitzgerald) detail
Untitled #1378 (Zelda Fitzgerald).
While the scale of her work is awe-inspiring – these aren’t delicate tabletop pieces but enormous installations that gather the shadows around them like dark pools, and seem to seep into every corner of their spaces. Delicate pearl pins catch stray beams of light, velvet moves like ink suspended in water, and wax accumulates in layers that feel ancient yet freshly formed. These pieces exist in a realm between preservation and decay, between memory and loss. Like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake, if it evolved into something nightmarish, they speak to mortality and remembrance through both their imposing presence and their intimate details.
Untitled #1379 (The Doctor’s Wife)
Untitled #1379 (The Doctor’s Wife) detail
Her use of materials is particularly spellbinding – especially the way she works with velvet, creating rich, undulating landscapes that cascade through space. The fabric collects twilight in its folds, transforming familiar luxury into something more complex and otherworldly. The way she builds up layers feels like discovering an enchanted chest where all the scraps and jewels and rich gowns from fairy tale queens have been deconstructed, scattered, and reassembled to tell new stories.
Here are the remnants of familiar tales – silk flowers trapped in crystalline wax, strands of pearls woven through branches, ribbons stiffened into strange new forms – all transformed into a private language written in texture and shadow. In these environments, collective memory mingles with personal mythology, where each element carries a story of mortality, memory, desire, and loss – private griefs and universal longings captured in frozen moments of perpetual bloom.
Untitled #1375 (No Reason Except Love- Portrait of a Marriage)
Untitled #1242 (Black Snowflake)
Untitled #1537 (Hannah Wilke)
Untitled #1399 (Bella Marya)
Untitled #1388M (Alias Grace)
Untitled #1274 (Death in Venice)
Untitled #1434
Untitled #1394 (Clarice Lispector)
Untitled #1103 (Daphne), detail
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
