So here it is.
I call it The Passenger because I sort of blanked out and drew this piece while listening to “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop on repeat? So here you go.
-Allēna
Tag: Our Art
-
I think I’m starting to figure out why I’m so reserved/”cold” emotionally.
When I was a teenager, like 13-15, I was a HOPELESS romantic. I would write fully fledged, and ultimately fully produced and orchestrated songs for my crushes and create massive works of art across a variety of mediums that took months, sometimes years, to complete, at an age when most boys couldn’t be arsed to get a girl flowers unless their mothers or sisters prompted them, ESPECIALLY if that girl scared them shitless.
And I was intense about this art. If someone inspired a piece, they’d probably end up knowing. I was intense about EVERYTHING. I was often the teachers’ favorite, I knew the answers to most questions, I HAD done the homework, I had an excellent memory, and I wasn’t afraid to kick anyone’s ass if and when it came time for trivia in almost any subject. I was a pompous dick about it, too 🤣 I was gonna win by a mile and I knew it. I wasn’t the type of person in high school that guys wanted to date. Be friends with, if they were daring, but not date.
The transition from hopeless romantic to cynic came at about age 16-17 after endless rejections and being told to tone myself down over and over. I began to hate my happy, romantic side. After one final diplomatic rejection from the guy I had written “My Island” about and being told to tone myself down one final time, I marched into my long term hairstylist’s office as soon as she was free and told her to cut all my damn hair off and give me the pixie cut I’d desperately wanted since my headmate Castor had cut our hair short like that when he was 10. I buried the rest of my sentimentality with that haircut, too, and started playing my cards close to my chest.
I still wrote huge things for my crushes, but that, too, stopped after I wrote my album The Places We Come Home To in 2018 for my first husband when I was 20.
I hated it so viscerally that it took two years to release a proper follow-up to it, Light on the Final Day, and I had written that record a few months BEFORE most of Places ever occurred to me.
It would take nearly three years after that for us to release any kind of proper follow-up to Light on the Final Day, something broke in me so badly. And it wasn’t even really me that wrote any of it, Metacognition (2023) is Eight’s masterpiece.
And for someone used to writing and recording several records a YEAR, this devastated me.
It’s taken being in several lovely partnerships to get me to uncover a FRACTION of that sentimentality. I still really can’t write happy things without cringing or feeling sick, but I’m getting there. I’m immensely grateful for their patience while I unfuck myself.
-Allēna -
I don’t know who the FUCK I am (DID is weird like that)
But APPARENTLY I CAN PAINT/DRAW???
Have these as proof. LÄ“na is gonna shit a sideways brick when she comes back to front and sees this.
-Sender unknown
-
“the fire watcher’s bomb”, digital mixed media, 8/27/2025
my mother, a self professed pyromaniac, my late father, and I, all loved the band u2. her favorite song (and album) of theirs was, not so coincidentally, in my opinion, called “the unforgettable fire”. was she telling on herself? probably.
our poem “the fire watcher’s bomb” talks about the two generations of pyromaniacs on our mother’s side that came before us, our own struggles with compulsions, and our mother’s projections. this digital mixed media piece contains lines from “the fire watcher’s bomb”.
“the fire watcher’s bomb” appears in our upcoming zine, fear not the brave pain, which drops on october 11. ✨
it’s gonna be fire 🔥
-Allēna
-
Painted this at an art thing at the library today.
I think I also got sun sick, so I am about to go home and pass the fuck outtttt. -Allēna
-
Today on suckerpunching our inner critic.
Your bitch applied for an artist residency to work on shit this summer.
Why?
Why not.
The worst they’ll do is turn me down.
At best? We get a stipend to work on cool shit like this here website and other things and we meet other artists and work with them.
Fuck it. Let’s ride.
The fucking kicker was the bio I wrote:
Ashley Halliwell (they/any) is a 27 year old neurodivergent, disabled, and chronically ill multidisciplinary artist. Their they/them is, in fact, plural, as they discovered in their teens that they were a DID system after surviving a massive stroke in infancy. The stroke cost them roughly an eighth of their brain, most of the use of their left hand, but in return, they got synesthesia, a foul mouth, a near photographic memory, a heaping dose of stubbornness, off the charts pattern recognition and intuition, and the ability to play instruments by ear. On top of that, they deal with AuDHD, CPTSD, an as of yet undiagnosed set of chronic illnesses, and even more genetic mutations. And that was only the second time they almost died.
They often joke that whatever god(s) made them made them sick because if they were abled, they’d be too powerful.
Much of their work is wry, chock full of dark humor, inspired by their life, and as bold and colorful as they are. They’re unafraid to fail their way forward, paint everything in vivid colors, and use the strongest language you’ve ever heard.
They’re a four time published author. They released their first poetry collection The Caesura and the Silence in 2016, followed by their second poetry collection To Dance with a Cyclone in 2019, their first play script Lavender and Scissors in 2020, and their third poetry collection Singing Molten Gold To The Morning in 2021.
They’ve also produced, engineered, released, and recorded 15 albums under the name Candy For Trees, the most recent being 2023’s Hardshell. Pretty impressive for having functional use of only 1.333 hands, right?
When they aren't sleeping or eating a galaxy's worth of food, they're trolling bigots on the Internet, telling stories about their roller-coaster of a life, or working on their current project, their chaos haven/online art collective in the making, Open Sorcery, which can be found at vince.opensorceryy.co/.We’ll see what happens. Results arrive shortly…
-Allēna
-
One (1) dumbass, delivered.
A self portrait.
Can I draw hands? The jury is out.
Anyway, it’s me.
-Lazarus ✨🪕🤣
Fediverse Reactions
-
