What patient congregation gathers beneath the roots of forests and pitch black oceans and the crumbling foundations of cities, in shapes without flesh or spirit but older than either? They writhe together in endless knots and they hunger for the secret weight hidden within all living things: the unbearable memory of having once been whole.

Beneath kingdoms they pass without resistance and they enter cathedrals and prisons alike. They enter the chambers of kings and the mouths of infants and the dreaming skulls of beasts asleep beneath the snow. Nothing rejects them, for all things secretly yearn toward the softness beneath the world, and even now, the earth swells and darkens with insatiable loving appetites.

Musca domestica is a multidisciplinary artist with a practice that spans mixed media, painting, tattoo, installation, and sculpture. At sixteen, she sustained a traumatic head injury that resulted in significant memory loss, and much of her fine art practice emerges from that rupture, reconciling the fragmented recall of a chaotic upbringing with explorations of identity, belief, and perception.

Icons of devotion and transgression in her work are at once sacred and profane, the same forms viewed from different positions in space and time. Loss and longing are held up to the light with a compassionate curiosity that begets intensive interrogation. She is reaching for the transcendent, and the work is the reaching.

And when at last the great blossom opens above the world, what shall remain separate? The sinner and the divine shall lie down together beneath its shadow and every grief shall soften and every memory shall split apart like ripened fruit, and in that vast flowering, the darkness shall rejoice to discover that it has always been endlessly seeded with the same secret and patient hunger as life.

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