The Artist Behind The Establishment’s Official Love T-Shirt Believes In The Power Of Every Body
By: Katie Tandy
Tags: Valentines Day, Contest, Arts Creators, Love, Disability

‘I’m an amputee and this image is one of the first I’ve created that addresses what being disabled is, sans able-bodied expectations.’

Here at The Establishment, we spend a lot of time talking and writing and thinking and scream-crying about the elaborate ways in which homosapiens wrong one another. (In addition to the planet, non-human animals, and maybe even extraterrestrials—there’s a LOT of space-junk out there people.)

We thought that this Valentine’s Day, we should talk about love, but Establishment-style, because the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy doesn’t take a day off.

So we partnered with the Creative Action Network — which “crowdsources campaigns around causes, inviting anyone and everyone to contribute their own designs” — to help us host an art project to talk about love in 2018…

…and turn one chosen design into our official Est. Love T-Shirt.

Out of 14 amazing submissions we chose the work of Artemis Xenakis, which you can buy below!

Here’s what Artemis had to say about her work, her life, and the beautiful aberration we call love.

“Our bodies are the vessel for how we experience the world, and the world has an ever growing fracture from the absence of love. Where love has recessed, systems of oppression take hold, diminishing humanity down to the bodies that carry us through this existence. Living under these measures, we are all at odds within our very selves, with our fellow people, and with our home planet. This is because Love needs a space to manifest, a vessel to carry its truth in the forms of empathy and true equality. Love needs to grow from the decay of hatred. Love needs to heal fear. Loves needs the full participation of people to be felt, given, and known. Love needs all bodies to be.”

We talked to Artemis to find out more about her brilliant design, her artistic process, and her thoughts on love and existentialism.

(Check out the other holy-shit, hell-yes submissions throughout this interview as well — all of which are on sale too!)

KATIE: Tell me a bit about yourself! Where did you grow up, when did you realize you wanted to create art and anything else wonderful or strange you’d like to include…

Look! It’s Artemis.

ARTEMIS:

It’s hard for me to trace back to a moment of realization with art because I can’t remember a time I didn’t draw on something, anything; a coloring book; a napkin; my bedroom door (the latter was much to my parents’ chagrin, yet they understood my drive).

My mom especially is very supportive of the Arts and Artists; she was an art docent for my classes all throughout elementary school, so I just grew up with a strong yet subconscious understanding of its importance in education and societal roles. I say subconscious because as an adult I see in retrospect how that form of expression influenced each of my interests and drives. Drawing was certainly art’s first manifestation in my creative pursuits, and it only ever spiraled from there.

Mythology was presented to me early on—in part because of my name and Greek heritage—but also because of my psychological response to these stories. When I wasn’t actively pursuing a creative work I was taking in myth and symbol from all corners of storytelling and filtering them through my passive thoughts and feelings.

And in the nature of peculiar things children do when left to their own devices, I would make art in ritualistic ways that I understood later in my early adulthood to be akin to Witchcraft practices. For instance, I loved to climb trees and carve made-up symbols in the branches that were meant for only the tree and me to understand; I would write poems that were meant to conduct any negative feelings I had and then I would take my frustration out on tearing up the paper and throwing it away. Communing with nature, directing your energy in sigil writing, banning negativity and enacting for what you want, all take creative thought and process.