Subscribe to Salon de l’Empress
>100 subscribers
Originally written in July 2023 for a virtual gallery build on Oncyber with the Line project showcasing Damsels. Copied unedited for posterity.
As an artist, I’ve always been fascinated by the human form, and it has been a consistent theme of mine through my trad art and crypto art career. Before Damsels the series, there were a lot of PROTO DAMSELS with my first works on OpenSea in Spring 2021, which I digitized, then glitched out of them. I’m still really proud of this series because it was me bridging my traditional art practice back into digital AND actually sharing them with the world.
Links to a couple of these works on OpenSea:
Multi-versatile Artist//Matriarch of Mistakes//Chaotic Oracle//Art Validator//Cat Peepo Army//Trash Can, not Cannot//She/They//
Multi-versatile Artist//Matriarch of Mistakes//Chaotic Oracle//Art Validator//Cat Peepo Army//Trash Can, not Cannot//She/They//
Shortly after this, I created one of my first series on OG H=N titled “Figuratively Speaking,” in which I took figure drawings done in watercolor, scanned them, then applied a hue cycle to give them life. These were very popular and were the foundation of my place in the Tezos art community.
Links to the Figuratively Speaking series:
https://objkt.com/@empresstrash?search=figuratively%20speaking
There are also two glitch pieces I created just a month or two before DAMSELS, quite literally titled Damsel 1 + Damsel 2, in which I took stills from 1950s BDSM films and glitched them. All of these works and series, I feel, are me trying to bring together two disparate parts of me in traditional and digital art creation.
Links to Damsel I + II:
https://objkt.com/tokens/hicetnunc/111932 https://objkt.com/tokens/hicetnunc/111968
The culmination of all of this was that I was invited to Newport Beach, CA, to exhibit in a Crypto Jazz Fest, in which people bought my art right there on the spot and encouraged me to go buy an iPad + Apple Pencil with the money. I did, and it changed everything about my process and was the natural bridge of my traditional skills and digital and love for animation.
After a couple months of iPad experiments in Procreate, there was, in later Summer/Fall of 2021, the Fame Lady Squad fiasco. For those who don’t know, Fame Lady Squad was one of the first PFP projects that presented themselves as an all-woman team, and all the PFPs were of women. They claimed, too, they were going to donate a portion to domestic violence charity — which, as a survivor myself, I decided to buy one and advocate for the project.
Within a short time, it was figured out the FLS team was actually 3 Russian men pretending to be women. This caused a community outrage. This was a turning point for me. Instead of yelling about it on the internet like I usually would, I took all that anger and said to myself, I’m going to draw my own women – fuck men exploiting us and our form anymore.
I focused everything I could to try to make the simplest, gestural feminine form à la old master’s sketches, but also rich with bright colors and the 2-frame wiggle animation to grab attention and give them life. I also was pissed about how sex workers and LGBTQ people were being treated in the world as a whole, so I was like, fuck it, I’m making it about all that too – because they are part of my identity as well. This is going to be the collection in the raw nude, wiggling, bright-color forms that represents all of us and stands for us.
Thus Damsels were born. Currently, the collection sits at 341 of the eventual goal of 666 made, minted on ETH and TEZ. All are sold out on primary.
As of writing this and until I reboot this collection – which will happen – I’ve taken a break. The year-long journey from the 1st Damsel to number 341 was an arduous and emotional one for me. From trauma, I have bad body dysmorphia, which makes this collection very personal. Also, there is a lot of hate for LGBTQ bodies and sex workers on the internet, and fielding that was taking a toll on my mental health. I have been taking the time to shore myself up mentally, work on learning new technologies like AI and Touch Designer, and now building out this line to reflect further on the scope and importance to me of this collection.
This part is being written as of 18/11/2025.
In reflection I have realized for me, endlessly drawing the nude figure — starting as a child trying to process what was happening to me, then traditional life-drawing classes, then on the iPad for Damsels — became accidental therapy long before I knew the words for it. When sexual trauma fucked with my body image so hard that every time I look in the mirror my body changes, the repetitive practice of drawing real naked bodies hour after hour rewires something.
At some point, I stopped seeing “perfect” or “broken” and started seeing just… bodies. Art therapists and studies on survivors have shown this to be true: repeatedly observing and rendering the human form in its messy reality chips away at body dysmorphia because you’re training your brain to accept variation instead of disgust. It’s exposure therapy with charcoal and an Apple Pencil; I confront the flesh I was taught to be ashamed of and that was for others to control until it stops feeling like evidence of my damage and starts feeling neutral, even powerful.
The two-frame wiggle in the gif animation further is me breathing life back into bodies that trauma tried to freeze or erase. The tiny loop becomes proof that this form can still shift, breathe, exist on its own terms. For someone whose dysmorphia screams “hide it, hate it, don’t let anyone see,” putting hundreds of bright, wiggling, unapologetic nudes out there was the ultimate fuck-you to every person who ever made me feel dirty for having curves, scars, or desire.
Since creating the Oncyber Gallery and the first part of this writing, Damsels have moved along slowly. I have been dealing with pain issues from various reasons, causing my right hand to go numb, and have also done intense physical therapy to start being able to draw and paint regularly again.
The main housekeeping thing I have completed was I have moved Damsels from the OG OpenSea shared contract to its own Base contract. Why Base? Well, I think Base will be around for a long time so my work will also be, and also the fees allowed me to airdrop the replacements to existing holders and mint new without being beholden to eth mainnet gas fluctuations. The legacy collection on the shared OS contract still exists as a retired collection, but the Base contract is where I will be putting the rest of the Damsel collection once I finish it.
Right now I have about 55 completed but not minted. I am plugging along very quickly and have a goal of finishing the collection completely by the end of year fully how I initially intended: as 666 unique works with 333 on Tezos and 333 on Ethereum (Base). They will all be dropped at once priced at about ~$100 USD in ETH or TEZ; no longer will the Tezos ones be priced lower.
There are a few on primary still available as I write this from a small batch I released earlier this year as I started to be able to draw again. Thank you everyone who has supported my journey and specifically this collection.
LINKS Legacy Damsel About: https://empresstrash.neocities.org/damsels
Official Ethereum Base Collection on Manifold Contract (not opensea shared):
https://opensea.io/collection/damsels
CA: 0x6fc0d5077425a22e6033cd905ca973597449455b
Tezos Collection: http://objkt.com/collection/KT1XFux589Np2umqZgcBpquJe4zB437K3ALC
OpenSea Shared Contract Retired Legacy Collection: https://opensea.io/collection/damsels-legacy
1 comment
Hi