Seasons of the Monstrous Feminine

Description

We have celebrated the changing of the seasons for centuries and there are so many religions that celebrate it in their own respected ways. The four seasons we experience on earth are all characters in their own right. They give us different weather patterns and phenomena, different trees, flora, fauna, they shorten and lengthen our days and nights. We celebrate and give thanks. For my thesis, I wanted to explore what these seasons would look like? as cosmic horror entities. Cosmic Horror is a genre created by H.P Lovecraft, in which he sets his characters against unknown forces from another realm. With the influence of Lovecraft's eldritch horrors, these designs also take inspiration from the monstrous feminine, which is a reference to the interpretation in horror movies conceptualizing women as victims. The idea of being a woman is to be feared, to know fear. To hold the two simultaneously within yourself, to know that the body, by the sheer fact of its existence, will be terrified by the society that claims to be terrorized by it; that the patriarchy deems women?s bodies so awful, so monstrous, that it seeks to limit and control their power. These designs reflect the beauty and the ugly, of the female form. Those aspects of our body that society rejects and tries to control. These concepts culminate in a narrative in which these are found documents that were created by a traveling journalist who comes across these entities and documents their existence. But the core inspiration for making the entities female presenting is because of the Triple Goddess, which is a Wiccan figure that represents the three stages of a woman's life – the maiden, the mother, and the crone. The seasons also reflect which aspect of the goddess is prominent – spring belonging to the maiden, summer for the mother, fall for the crone, and during the winter, the goddess returns to mother, in which she is pregnant and will give birth to the sun god, who brings around spring. I want to celebrate the idea of the beauty and the struggles of being a woman. Representing this concept as powerful entities, that are both revered and feared for all that they symbolize.