Feral Wom+n: Mercy, Discovering

Lauren Kalita

Interview by L. Valena
Via email, September 2025

Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

The prompt is a mixed media assemblage using wood, plastic, faux grass, possibly gemstones or their simulacra. The piece is photographed on an expanse of the same faux grass square within the assemblage, or this background expanse is part of the piece and the piece is actually a photograph with "assemblage" within/on fake grassy background as context. I am inclined toward the former interpretation, simply because it's sort of inculcated in me given what I've been most exposed to, though the latter is compelling to consider exactly because the former is my default. And my practice, my interest, resides most fruitfully at the intersection of assemblage and photography...

What were your first thoughts/feelings about it? Where did you go from there?

Its use and juxtaposition of geometric forms (squares within squares, TRIANGLE) and bold primary colors (REDORANGE & GREEN) had the greatest resonance for me in terms of impressing themselves on my memory when I wasn't looking consciously with the picture open on my desktop. These juxtapositions and an interpretation I couldn't escape of the REDORANGE TRIANGLE representing a bovine head or skull seen from above, flattened, drove me. My first instinct was to respond with another assemblage but I quickly realized I didn't like my primary motivations: assemblage for assemblage is not necessarily inspired, new assemblage was on my art to-do list (it'd been a minute, having spent the previous month immersed in photo sessions), the sense that I needed an excuse to "get to my list" = ick. The fact that the Bait/Switch time frame precluded assembling the kind of materials I like to use with the resin I've been obsessed for the last year with using as the binding material, and that I always have issues with photographing my 3D in-the-round pieces to best effect, made me let go of assemblage as my response medium. I had to genuinely, or more deeply, sit with the prompt and allow it to work on me in order to produce the conditions, the time necessary for sincere inspiration, as opposed to reaction. This is what I feel ekphrasis to be, though intellectually I can also make the argument for reaction as valid ekphrastic response...

Can you tell us about what you ultimately ended up making? How did you go about it?

I wound up using an image taken during a photo session almost as soon as I received my prompt, and putting it through a very minimal process of addition using my iPad's pre-loaded photo app. At first I'd expected to make an assemblage in response to the prompt I was given, but nothing I started to make resonated and I realized that, while I'm about 60/40 photography to assemblage, I was simply reacting quid pro quo, as it were, rather than allowing inspiration. What I kept seeing whenever I thought about my response to the prompt was this particular photo, so I just went with it. I think it was to do with directionality within the image, shape and proportion, as well as color. I moved the photographic image to the upper left quadrant of the ultimate image field, and added the other elements within the final piece, some of which are other images from this same photo session. This is something I never do. My photos are always used as is.

What do you think the piece you made is saying?

What the piece is saying is not for me to say. I always hope my work will generate curiosity and paroxysms of emotion beyond an anodyne baseline of pleasantry, nicety.

Can you say more about how this piece relates to the rest of your work?

I think this piece relates to the rest of my work insofar as everything I've been working on for the last five years - the photography, assemblage, writing - has been generated by an obsession with "the female experience" - the gaze, the rage, the shame, the joy, the self-love, the self-loathing, the indeterminacy... Wom+n presented by wom+n - what that looks like, sounds like, feels like; how it differs and is inevitably similar - no matter how we may profess otherwise - to women as presented by men. All of my work has therefore entered the world under the auspices of my feral wom+n project. My idea of the feral is that which is unmediated in one's nature. A feral wom+n is one who maintains their sense of self/selves in defiance of what cultural gatekeepers deem acceptable for "women." I am interested in moments of access to the feral selves, & the ways in which such freedom is passed between wom+n, often mothers & children. My writing, photography, videos, & multimedia assemblages are essays at slitting the difference between expectations of the performance of femininity & my lived experience as a wom+n slit by multifarious factors including gendered violence & internalized misogyny. As such, the feral wom+n project is inherently interested & invested in departure(s): from expectations, from assumptions, from the familiar, from that which harms insidiously as a result of the ostensible norms imposed by a ravenous & rapidly calcifying dominant culture so many of us simply do not belong to, whether perforce or by choice.

Do you have any advice for another artist participating in this project?

I feel more equipped and entitled to giving advice as a person and as a woman of a certain age than as an artist. And what occurs to me right now is the same as if I'd been asked to give advice from any of my aspects of self: find the access point(s) to your intuition, nourish them and generate work from there, putting the intellect in the service of all your parts that engage other consciousnesses (un-, sub-, super-); trust your sense of an ending and move on to the next thing without apology.

Call Number: R100VA | R101VA.kaFe

LAUREN KALITA is a writer and artist living on Cape Cod in the U.S. with her family. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Carrion Press, Discount Guillotine, Cape Cod Review, Worms World’s Extended Lunch cookbook, Spunk Art & Perspectives, Lit Angels, Gilded Dirt, Still Point Journal, Big Red Cat, HOCUS, Violet Indigo Blue, Etc., The Columbia Review, High Shelf Press, Right! Right?!, and Long Shore Drift. Her feral wom+n art project, including collaborative photos as well as assemblages in the series “milagros” and “broken clothing,” has been shown in the U.S. across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and California, as well as in the UK.