Facing a serious illness in 2023, I started a series of self-portraits collectively titled “Between the Moon and Me.” These drawings and paintings explore moon rites, animal familiars, matrilineal ties, the solidarity I feel with the seasons, and my relationship to my gender and my body, which would be permanently changed through major surgery.

The portraits reflect my ongoing interest in depicting human-animal relationships as mutual, embodied, and transformative. In medical science, animals suffer for the sake of human longevity. What I learned about my diagnosis and treatment is known largely through experimentation on animals, particularly white rabbits, white rats, and other mammals. Certain works represent my unhappiness about the loss of non-human life in the preservation of my own, while others express a closeness between myself and the animal victims of medical research. We share the same health issues, after all.

My illness was a time of both great fear and deep introspection. Returning to themes that were important to me as a young feminist artist in the 1990s, I found inspiration and comfort in the non-human worlds around me, from visits of birds and insects to the arrival of never-before seen flowers in my garden, and new animals encountered on my walks. Seasonal changes and the phases of the moon touched me in new ways. Many of the paintings represent a turning-inwards, or a turning-towards a non-human companion.

Given the nature of my illness, facing my mortality meant confronting my femininity. I would lose parts of myself that, since my birth, had identified me as a “woman”. What would remain once those parts were gone? In the months leading up to and following major surgery, I turned to these self-portraits as a means to establish representational space for what I felt was my true self, the Cynthia that was attuned to animals, nature, living things of all kinds. I felt I was painting for my life.

The series takes inspiration from the work of other women artists, such as Margaret Evans Price, Remedios Varos, Rebecca Aldernet, Catrin Welzstein, Lizzie Riches, and Virginia Frances Sterrett. In the piece below, I was inspired by Frida Khalo’s famous painting, The Two Fridas (1939). The Two Frida show Khalo in a seated, double self-portrait, gazing at the viewer. Linked by veins and clasped hands, both figures’ hearts are exposed to view. One of the women bleeds from a severed vein onto her white, European-style garment; her heart appears mortally damaged. Her counterpart, dressed in traditional Tehuana clothing and holding a tiny portrait of her long-time partner, appears stronger.

My painting echoes the composition of Khalo’s double-portrait, placing two of myself in a landscape that shifts from night to day, and winter to spring. The figure on the left holds a pomegranate, whose juices run down the figure’s right hand. The figure on the right holds a rose and looks back at herself. Two wolves accompany the seated figures, and on the right, a red cardinal looks on.

The birds, animals, insects, plants, and heavenly bodies depicted in the self-portraits all have precise symbolic meanings that may or may not be apparent to the viewer. I drew from the history of witchcraft, for example, in the painting below, which shows a bear and myself embracing in an underground lair, surrounded by oak and mistletoe leaves, and fine roots. A thin layer of snow towards the top of the composition demarcates the earth from an inky sky, which is full of stars. Oak trees were sacred sites where witches met and practiced rituals, while mistletoe was associated with vitality and resilience.

In all these paintings, there is a complicity between the non-human and the human. The frailty and fear that are at times apparent in the works are balanced by tenderness, compassion, care, and love.