Digital Art by a.d.
Artist’s Statement:
While I enjoy working with different mediums, including painting, digital art, collage and sculpture, my preferred medium for my visual art is photography, particularly surreal and conceptual self-portraiture. I like to slip into different identities to explore different themes and perspectives, and thus my art can be very intimate.
‘self-portrait as a sacred deer’ is a photographic self-portrait, realized in August 2024. I worked with multiple photographs and then edited digitally to achieve the double exposure effects. The inspiration behind this piece was the sacrifice of Iphigenia, as recounted in Greek myth. Agamemnon, while hunting, kills a deer that is sacred to Artemis, and in return she demands the sacrifice of his daughter. In one version of the myth, the goddess swaps the girl for a deer at the last moment, sparing her. For my version, I decided to portray the girl metamorphosing into a deer. This work forms part of a hybrid collection I’m working on currently, on the cursed House of Atreus.
‘the hidden sacred’, realized in February 2025, is another self-portrait from an ongoing series of works that explore themes of religious trauma, iconography and the multiple facets of the self, while blending the sacred with the profane. Once again I worked on my original photos digitally to achieve the haunting effect.
(untitled): This is a digital collage piece, realized in April 2024, also from the same series, that evolved from a one-line poem prompt. It includes an edit of José Vergara’s painting “The Good Shepherd”, with overlaid text and handdrawn elements.
Self-Portrait As a Sacred Deer (originally published in Antler Velvet Arts Magazine)
The Hidden Sacred
Untitled
BIO: a.d. is a bisexual poet and visual artist. She is drawn to the sacred, the profane, the mysterious and the mythological, which provides inspiration for her work. As an artist, she works mainly with photography and artistic self-portraiture and strives to capture the ephemeral and transcendental, often using the female body to explore eroticism and religion. Her work is or will be featured in SCAB, Hominum Journal, body fluids, Moonday Mag, RESURRECTION Magazine, and Bleating Thing, among others. Meanwhile, her poetry is published in Anti-Heroin Chic, PISSOIR!, the engine(idling, DOG TEETH and elsewhere. Tumblr & Twitter: @godstained