Monstress is my name for a particular mode of thinking that helps me stay optimistic, productive, and just sane enough to function in these ridiculous times.
It began back in 1996, when I was studying to become a Mistress of Printmaking. I was making all kinds of work and trying to figure out what the word “artist” actually meant to me. By then, I’d already spent four years as a printmaker and had fallen hard for silkscreen and relief printing. The affordability, the immediacy, the gritty magic of it—it hooked me. Printmaking has a built-in legitimacy, a history of political expression that I couldn’t resist. And it was cheap enough to keep making without going hungry.
But I was getting tired of making diaristic work—all these coded images about my own life, adolescent growing pains disguised as art. I started wanting more: a bigger conversation, a broader message, some way to reach out and connect. Maybe even make the world a little less bleak in the process.
So I turned to the tools of mass persuasion. I studied propaganda, advertising, packaging design, and the western obsession with branding. If I wanted to share ideas, it made sense to learn the most effective vehicles for doing so. That led to digging into utopian theory, confidence games, placebo studies, and optical illusions—all in service of finding ways to spotlight quiet, subversive messages that might otherwise go unnoticed.
The Products
The Monstress™ line is my ongoing attempt to respond to the absurdities of modern life. I still struggle to draw a clean line between this work and my more personal artwork, and I’ve never figured out how to market the products sensibly. In two decades, I’ve made maybe $2,000. I either give them away or they walk off—stolen, which I guess is a kind of compliment.
The Logo
The logo represents the soul—or whatever we call that core self before we’re trained to see and name the world around us. Before language, before expectations, we simply are. That raw, indescribable self still lives inside us. I believe we can radically change—perspective, identity, everything—right up until the moment we die.
The Name
It’s “Monstress” for a reason. I wanted the name to invoke the feminine—not as it’s usually defined, but as something uncodified, open, and full of potential. That ambiguity is powerful. When you’re not told what you should be, you’re free to become whatever you actually are. So yes, get in touch with your feminine side. It's not just liberating—it might bite.
The Point
Monstress is my way of pointing to the shapeshifting possibility that still exists in our prefab, money-hungry, over-mediated world. Sure, I work from within the very systems I critique. I may never escape that frame.
Call it hope. Call it delusion. Call it overthinking or straight-up bullshit.
I call it Monstress Productions.