"Hard or Soft Option: Artifacts of Transmutation" was a title and concept that, unlike most other things I've made, arrived after the fact.
The intention I brought was this: tell the truth, and keep it simple. While that lyric "will you choose the hard or soft option" from the iconic Pet Shop Boy's song was on repeat in my head as I was assembling, I didn't think much of it.
It wasn't until I was editing the photos that I had taken on a whim at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama that the meaning emerged. I had made these in the end stages of a cycle, one where I had allowed what didn't serve me to burn to black tar and used it as fuel.
Each of these pieces emerged from a state of Transmutation, inevitably revealing its varied forms: grief into motion, collapse into clarity, growth into exhilaration.
Points of Interest, Inspiration, and Fuel
The Philosopher's Stone, Alchemical Transmutation, The Hermetics and Jung
Magnum Opus: Nigredo, Albedo, and Rubedo. From Pretiosissimum Donum Di, 1475
Hard or Soft Option traces the stages of alchemical transmutation described in Hermetic traditions and later explored by Carl Jung in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections: Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas, and Rubedo.
- Nigredo: putrefaction, decay, ego death, blackening
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Albedo: purification, reflection, clarity
- Citrinitas: emergence, illumination, sun energy
- Rubedo: integration, embodiment, vitality
Originally purported as a sort of magic formula for transmuting matter into gold, these stages serve as a profound set of alchemical symbols for the ugly facts of personal growth and the truth of how it really looks, feels, and behaves.
Robert Fludd, 1617
I imagine the Nigredo stage as burning everything down into charcoal and ash. It's the collapse, the darkest of dark nights. It's necessary if transformation is to be achieved, but that doesn't mean it's not utterly brutal.
Rebecca Rebouché (from Louisiana!), Auriferious Swan
Albedo is the stage of cleansing, reflection; the eerie calm and clarity experienced after the devastation.
Citrinitas and Rubedo are the stages of illumination and return, but not where we once were. We are forever changed. We are gold, baby.
Melancholia
In Melancholia, the destruction of everything that humankind has known is slow and inevitable. One person in a wheedling social ecosystem is capable of confronting it simply: Justine. And Justine is sad.
Screenshot: Justine gauging the planet's closeness
There are many resonant symbols here also present in 1.0: River, Ocean. And not to ruin the plot, but there's a strange, alien sense of growing freedom and release as the doom draws nearer. The acceptance is inevitable. One of the most arresting moments for me is when Justine witnesses streaks of electromagnetic light emanating from her fingertips. On a golf course (of course it's on a golf course).
This experience of witnessing this film is the exact feeling of accepting something dreadful and inevitable, an ending utterly impervious to the ego or human persuasion. A play-by-play reenactment of Nigredo/Dark Night of the Soul.
Moving through 2025 demanded something specific of me: surrender. Acceptance of the facts at hand, no more bypassing, no more putting an instagram filter on it. It's done. Only the matter that is honestly offered can be transformed.
The Unraveling Black Thread, Maison Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester, and the Deconstructionist Rebels
LtoR: Yohji Yamamoto SS21, Ann Demeulemeester FW20, Ann Demeulemeester "Corps Humain" SS98, Ann Demeulemeester FW24, Ottolinger SS21
Unraveling. The striking visual of a skein of ink black silk splitting open after being cut was one of the only predetermined motifs that I knew had to exist in this drop.
And it tracks. My subconscious is littered with images of Margiela, Comme Des Garcons, Yamamoto, Ann Demeulemeester, and all manner of deconstructionist runway auteurs. I've favored them for two decades. The exposed seams, coal blacks and parchment whites, visible threads cascading downward like nervous systems.
LtoR: Maison Martin Margiela SS99 (first three); Chalayan SS02; Comme des Garcons SS92
This work refuses to conceal its construction. It calls status quo into question simply by having the audacity to exist.
It's unfinished, allowing, honest. It's bored with perfectionism. It shows its bones.
These wearable sculptures serve as a different kind of armor amongst the Chanel tweed suits and the Valentino chiffon frocks. They reject the fantasy of flawlessness, opting into a universe that's far more interesting: tension, process, evidence.
It throws a middle finger to perfectionism, opting for art instead.
And God, do I love that.
The Spiral and Hilma Af Klint
Clockwise from top left: ancient Egyptian stone carving, hurricane system, passionflower vine tendril, bead from early Bronze Age Iran, nautilus, Alexander Calder spiral, fiddle leaf fern, and, well, every known thing.
The Spiral is so timeless and omnipresent that it might be the least subtle symbol that there is. Its geometry is evident across sacred sites, storm systems, outer space, ancient human rituals, plant life, and yes, shells.
The "spiral out" is transformation with memory of its origin point, not in spite of it. It signals creation, growth, and the eternal nature of life/death cycles. Meanwhile, the "spiral in" signifies the many loops of lesson-learning endured before finally reaching the center; "circling the drain" as it were.
Ancient spiral petroglyphs appear independently in locations all over the world, suggesting that perhaps these ancient humans, through connection to nature, had connected to something bigger than themselves.
Perhaps whatever the ancients connected to was the same Big Thing that Hilma Af Klint, the world's first abstract artist (it wasn't Kandinsky, I WILL die on that hill), also connected herself to.
Hilma Af Klint knew that her work was for the future. A spiritualist and a mystic, her abstract paintings appeared far more untethered to the physical world than any known artist before her. Her paintings were spiritual practice.
LtoR, The Dove No.1 Group IX/Uw 1910; Altarpieces, Group X No. 3 1915; The Ten Largest No. 6, Adulthood, Group IV 1907; The Swan No. 21 group IX/SUW 1916
Predating Kandinsky by years, her art was fully undiscovered and sat in a dank basement for decades. Through a startling and specific configuration of seemingly miraculous circumstances, her work remained there preserved until it was discovered in 1986, 42 years after her death.
Here's the kicker. It's documented that Hilma Af Klint predicted something incredible that would one day become reality.
Af Klint wrote that in the future, her works would be exhibited in its first major way in what she called "The Spiral Temple"; completing her collection "The Paintings for the Temple" in 1915 for that stated purpose.
Hilma Af Klint's first major solo US exhibition was located at The Guggenheim.
Af Klint's journal detailing "plans" for the Spiral Temple (1930-31) versus the actual Guggenheim (!!!).
Whether coincidence or prophecy, the resonance here is loud.
The spiral is a map of becoming, discarding the notion of "perfection" entirely. How "meta" it is that it was a central motif throughout Hilma Af Klint's life, work, and afterlife.
The Spiral, The Spirit Sister, and Me
My beloved friend, fellow psychonaut, and creative collaborator passed away in May of 2025. It'll be a full year in six days. Her impact can't be understated; she changed my trajectory and how I saw myself for the truer and the better, forever.
The spiral was her "thing". There's a bit of mythos passed around the friend group that she once scrawled an enormous one on a wall and joked that she was opening a portal, and some supernatural phenomena may or may not have taken place after that point (lol). The point is, after she passed, the symbol began appearing differently to me, and I noticed them much more. Especially spiderwebs and, of course, shells.
Grief itself is a spiral. First in, then out. And in a really profound and bittersweet way, the spiral was her "painting for the future" to me. The inheritance I received was a map of becoming.
And that map can take me wherever it is that I need to go.
Until next time,
Keke
