Most of my artwork centers on my vision of beauty, creativity, and love as an Assyrian person in a woman-loving-woman/gender-nonconforming relationship.

Like a lot of contemporary artists making art from an LGBT+ and non-white perspective within a cishetero- and white-dominant society, I gravitate toward depicting features that many of us are celebrating amongst each other specifically because they don’t fit into that dominant society—like dark body hair, or high-peaking hairlines, or broad shoulders, or wide or bumped noses.

Being from a very small ethnic group by way of my dad, who’s from Iraq, I’ve always been called to seek out anything that ties me to it in a way that feels meaningful to me: through writing, or more recently, other young Assyrian people on the internet. Visual art is a very natural way for me to articulate my sense of our enduring existence over thousands of years, despite our statelessness and relative unknownness outside of our own community. It makes me feel fulfilled when other people—Assyrians and otherwise—acknowledge my artwork because I feel like I am helping us stay alive in some small way.

Check more of her work out here,

Etsy:https://www.etsy.com/shop/FireEyeDesigns

Curator Emily Kellogg