The story of my creative identity

BOUND TO BE FREE

by Pamela Wells

 “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I am a Shibari performance artist and painter whose rope bondage is symbolic of my own spiritual evolution from self-dissolution to empowerment.[1] I use elements of performance art to visually communicate spiritual metaphors to celebrate the power of the goddess. As a woman who identifies herself as an everyday goddess, healer, lover, and mystic, I believe the human body, life on earth and sex are sacred. Being able to define myself gives me the power to choose who and how I love. Rope bondage is considered to be part of BDSM erotic roleplaying that include bondage and discipline (BD), dominance and submission (DS), and sadism and masochism (SM). The difference between BDSM relationships and culturally limiting hetero relationships (aka vanilla relationships) is that each person has equal negotiating power rather than assuming men have all the power and women must submit. BDSM is also inclusive of all lifestyle pairings regardless of gender identity or ethnicity. Practitioners tend to have a more fluid sexuality and higher sex drive than average.[2] BDSM is an excellent way to demonstrate my agency to choose what I express through planned scenes. My creative desires are dramatized in photos or paintings, challenging taboos around gender identity and sexuality.

My artworks represent me cocooned and bound by ropes and reflect my own truths about the power of the goddess and my personal journey. As an artist, I ask the question: “Who is the goddess?” For me, the female body is a symbol of the goddess often associated with sacred reverence and her great powers of empowered transformation, life and death, love or union, as well as embodying beauty and wisdom. My creative process involves capturing my altered states during performances in both the reference photos shot by my creative partner James Lott and my finished oil paintings. These images are intended to project feminine beauty, transformational states of consciousness, confidence, and sensuality.

My creative ideas were formed from the emotional and psychological pain of feeling bound up and restricted as a female child and adult woman. To combat being narrowly defined as a woman in that setting, my creative ideas also came from the healing solutions I discovered as I studied the spiritual principles underlying the world’s greatest faiths. When I was growing up, my parents’ relationship was a common 1950s—1980s narrative that included a submissive, white female living within the gender boundaries of a socio-political system in which the male gender and heterosexuality define the power hierarchy over other gender or sexual orientations.[3] By the time I was a young woman, I understood and liked men but was very confused about my own identity and role as a woman. The only thing I was sure of was that I did not want to perceive the world as a victim like so many other woman in my generation.

Thus, I have spent my entire life asking “Who am I?” At first, I tried to numb myself to the emotional pain I felt from not being seen or heard for the very qualities I would consider valuable feminine qualities in any culture—being emotionally expressive, wildly sensual and creative. Numbing the pain led me to a place of hopeless despair until my very reason for living was in question. After reaching a dark night of the soul, I completely surrendered and dedicated my life to the hope of a greater and more powerful source of meaning in my life.[4]  

As an outgrowth of my own dark night experiences, I recreated myself as a medium to help others in healing emotional, mental and spiritual trauma. www.sacredcontractreading.net A medium translates messages from the spirit world to this world. I receive intuitive information though any of the four claire senses: clairvoyance (clear seeing), clairaudience (clear hearing), clairsentience (clear feeling), or claircognizance (clear knowing).[5] The claire senses are channels through which to communicate to any higher being in the spirit realm. As I explored the claire senses, I realized I was able to pick up messages through all of them except hearing. With these intuitive skills combined, I was able to write and illustrate a spiritual healing guidebook for women called the Affirmations for the Everyday Goddessdeck (see fig. 1). Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess, which includes 22 illustrated affirmation cards and a 120-page spiritual guidebook for prayer and meditation. The deck is intended to empower women and communicate spiritual concepts to seekers. As a medium, the imagery I see can be also communicated visually in my paintings. www.affirmationsfortheeverydaygoddess.com

The questions I asked myself were about life and death, change, and transformation and have been answered by the great mystical traditions, but mostly from a masculine approach to spiritual practice through a meditative quieting of the mind. The forgotten but apparently valid feminine approach to spiritual realization is through embodied presence in this world.[6] As a woman, when I was going through self-discovery, the only relief that worked for me for anxiety or depression was imaginal contemplation, movement of any kind, and self-reflection. Healing my emotional and mental suffering came from feeling my emotional pain and expressing or moving the pain through my own body and into an actual physical experience, such as creating an artwork, walking in nature, dancing, or sex. 

As I healed I became an author, artist, in addition to a medium. www.sacredcontractreading.net As a medium, someone who mediates communication between the living and spirit, I was able to help others heal from emotional, mental, or spiritual trauma.[1] My mediumship prompted me to engage with the idea of being a woman in deeper, more meaningful ways. In the process, I explored personal metaphors for how I feel about my own power and sensuality. I began studying female deities throughout history. The challenge I gave myself was to paint women as empowered everyday goddesses. As I was looking for positive feminine role models outside my family and culture, I could not find religious iconography with positive representations of both dark and light qualities of the goddess in one all-powerful icon. Other than my own visions and ideas about who the goddess is, the confusion I felt from not having a human female role model or a powerful female deity, like the one God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, put me in a perpetual state of searching. 

[1] Shibari is an ancient rope tying practice that was used in Japan in the 1400s to bind prisoners. It has more recently evolved into a practice called Kinbaku or erotic rope art (Master “K” 15).

[2] Frédérike Labrecque, "What Is So Appealing About Being Spanked, Flogged, Dominated, or Restrained? Answers from Practitioners of Sexual Masochism/Submission," in The Journal of Sex Research (2020): 10.

[3] Francisco Valdes, "Unpacking Hetero-Patriarchy: Tracing the Conflation of Sex, Gender & Sexual Orientation to its Origins," in Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (1996): 211.

[4] The “dark night of the soul” is a metaphor associated with St. John of the Cross and refers to a person’s inner journey towards a union with God.

[5] Kevin Hunter, A Beginner’s Guide to the Four Psychic Clare Senses: Clairvoyance, Clairaudience, Claircognizance, Clairsentience (Warrior of Light Press, 2017), 1. 

[6] Joy Moates, Embracing Your Wild Feminine (Words of Passion, 2020), 25.