Return and Rupture: Art As Metamorphosis

Fieldnote_03

"Relics of Everything Unlived", ©REBELLICCA, 2025

1.10 pm

Art doesn’t always lead us home. Sometimes it disrupts the myth of home entirely, then becomes it. It's as if it rewires us mid-sentence, mid-breath, mid-rebirth, mid-self.

What follows was written without planning. Originally published as an IG story. Just a pulse, a spontaneous recognition of a truth that arrived whole. I left it unedited. Some truths do not wish to be sculpted. They wish to be honored as they arrived.

Maybe art is both a return to our true core and a blunt destruction of every point of origin. It matters less where we come from than what future seeks to emerge through us.

Even when we touch essence, we don’t return unchanged. The experience is both a return to ourselves and an arrival at a version of us we haven't met before. There are pieces that reconfigure us, emotion by emotion, toward the form we were always meant to fracture into.

We are never quite the same after we finish an artwork. An evolution takes place, slowly guiding us towards what we have chosen to become.

The artist's way is mostly the way of solitude. But there are moments when the work becomes the only witness. No applause, no echo, no confirmation. No one. Except the piece itself: sometimes a mirror, sometimes a mask. And if you’re lucky, maybe there is one other soul who sees it, holds it quietly, without needing to name what passed between you. It is there to accompany you on your journey within and without. It helps you face your distortions and make peace with them.

You can test the patience of old pain, but the past is not to be remembered, only transformed. Alchemized. Created from. Used as raw material for the next impossible shape or future.

Art is not memory. Art is metamorphosis - a ruthless paradise of destruction and rebirth.

And in that quiet undoing, we are remade.

In art we trust.

—R