When it comes to our inner fire, the burning life that sometimes keeps us warm and other times threatens to consume us and anyone around us, women are taught to repress and redirect it and men are taught to assert and aggravate it. As a woman whose inner fire has always been strong, I’ve spent four decades dampening the wood that fuels it, concealing it’s light and heat from anyone who it might overwhelm or burn — and instead it just overwhelms and burns me. For the past year, I have found an outlet in martial arts, a way to channel and direct the violence that would otherwise be simmering under my surface, and it’s been a revelation. If every girl and woman was told her strength was natural and her tenacity was valuable, the world would be a better place. If we were taught that female also meant embodying the archetypes of Scáthach, Kali, Hecate, Izanami, Neith, Oya, and Hel, we may not be so inclined to incapacitate ourselves with acrylics and heels and eyelashes. All the better to see, stomp, and punch you with, my dears.
JUSTYNA KOZICZAK’s art embodies the fiery, bloody, primeval strength of the female experience. Her paintings are portals that drip with blood and burn with light. In them, we see where life and power coalesce and where fear and weakness evaporate. Their brilliant colors and flowing movements illustrate women’s hidden knowledge, and the wisdom we’ve been forced to relearn each generation as the previous generation’s voices were silenced and obfuscated.
Sometimes I get frustrated that the bodies that ensure the survival of our species are the bodies we so often desecrate and destroy, but when I look at Koziczak’s paintings, I’m reminded that women’s strength has been forged in fire for millennia now. We are in community now, we are sharing our words and art with each other, and there’s no going back to the dark ages. Patriarchy is a decapitated chicken, running it’s last round before it collapses. We will prepare its body for the coming feast.
My fires don’t leave ashes and scars behind—they purify and allow to grow again.
– JUSTYNA KOZICZAK
We think of strength as the ability to burn others, but what of the strength to burn oneself and protect those we love instead of destroying them? We imagine power is the ability to draw blood from others, but what of the power of drawing blood from ourselves and persevering to heal those around us?
