SPUR

1. a device with a small spike or a spiked wheel that is worn on a rider's heel and used for urging a horse forward.

2.  a thing that prompts or encourages someone; an incentive.

3. a slender tubular projection from the base of a flower, e.g. a honeysuckle or orchid, typically containing nectar.

// Porcelain Marble

SONG TO THE SIREN

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been fixated on the Siren and the Vamp. I couldn’t consume enough - myths, folklore, films, all of it. In hindsight, maybe it was the duality of my own experience that seduced me.

Like a moth to a flame, I was drawn to the feminine who fully embraced her passion, her desire, her pleasure, so fully, she was dangerous. Deadly, even.

She wasn’t safe. She was feared.

Through her, pleasure meant annihilation. Death. Destruction. Surrender.

She was everything the “nice girl” wasn’t - the antithesis of what society taught young women to be: quiet, humble, modest, polite. Respectful. Dependable. Grateful. Obedient.

And I lapped up every facet of her.

She was my gateway. A portal to embody all the parts of me that had been shamed and tamed.
Later on, as I’ve matured and as my relationship to my sexuality evolved, I’ve come to know her as the Wild Woman. Not just the Siren of seduction, but the deep, intuitive force that lives in the bones. Untameable. Elemental. Free.

Society has always tried to cage her, naming her mad, dangerous, hysterical, sinful. Because a woman who listens to her body, who honours her desire, who chooses herself over pleasing others, that woman can’t be controlled.

Meeting the Wild Woman within me has meant calling back every exiled part.

Desire. Rage. Instinct. Pleasure. Grief.

And learning to hold them all.

Integration, not elimination.

Wholeness, not perfection.

And while I speak of her in feminine terms, the Wild Woman is an energy, an essence, a remembering that transcends form.

*Images shown here are a photographic collaboration with Graham Turner.