Episode 12 - Friday Jones: Art That Restores Wholeness

This week, Katherine talks with Friday Jones, a lifestyle artist with over thirty years in the tattoo industry and an EGOT client list, having inked Lorraine Bracco (Emmy), Aaron Neville (Grammy), Angelina Jolie (Oscar), and Lena Hall (Tony). Her work graces Robbie Williams on his Escapology album cover and Fender-Jackson’s Celtic Warrior axe. She’s designed for Walt Disney, Canon and Sony Pictures. She’s performed secret favors for Penélope Cruz and Uma Thurman. She's captured the imaginations of tech-art pioneers like American McGee and Kenny Schachter and decorated BBC darling Cerys Matthews. Diplomats? Check. Trailblazing accomplishments? She legalized tattooing in Montenegro and spearheaded the Marks of Protection campaign, resurrecting 15th-century Balkan resistance tattoos while raising awareness about modern slavery.

In 2024, Friday trained nurse practitioners from top US hospitals like NYU Langone, Georgetown University, and the Texas Medical Center in post-op tattooing techniques, blending artistry with healing. A mystic at heart, Friday’s collaboration with astrologer Holiday Mathis explores Jungian themes, hinting at the spiritual depth she’s weaving into her future projects. Her creative vision expands into fine art, as her Marks of Protection painting series, including the fiery debut Vrata, recently garnered buzz at Art Basel Miami. The accompanying photo series made its debut at the World Economic Forum with The Art Talk Magazine.

An award winning writer, fans can catch her witty cultural dispatches from NYC for The Times Square Chronicles. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone, and welcome to Hip Talks. I'm your host, Catherine Hinchy. I'm a certified hypnotherapist, NLP practitioner, and Sherub Senior Certified Professional in Human Resources. After spending a decade working in the music industry, my path led me into the world of the healing arts, where science, energy, mindset, and transformation all meet. Each week, I sit down with a different healing practitioner to explore the many powerful modalities available to support our growth, well-being, and personal evolution. So come with me on this journey of discovery and learn about all the opportunities for healing and transformation that are available to all of us.

Welcome To Hip Talks

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Friday is a lifestyle artist with over 30 years in the tattoo industry and an egot client list, having inked Lorraine Bracco, the Emmy, Aaron Neville, the Grammy, Angelina Jolie, the Oscar, and Lena Hall for the Tony. And her work graces Robbie Williams on his escapology album cover and Fender Jackson's Celtic Warrior Axe. She's designed for Walt Disney, Canon, and Sony Pictures. She's performed Secret Favors for Penelope Cruz and Uma Thurman. And she's captured the imaginations of tech art pioneers like American McGee and Kenny Schachter, and decorated BBC Darlin Ceres Matthews. I probably said that wrong. Diplomats check trailblazing accomplishments. She legalized tattooing in the Montenegro and spearheaded the Marks of Protection campaign, resurrecting 15th-century Balkan resistance tattoos while raising awareness about modern slavery. In 2024, Friday trained nurse practitioners from top U.S. hospitals like NYU Langone, Georgetown University, and the Texas Medical Center in

Meet Friday Jones And Her Work

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post-op tattooing techniques, blending artistry with healing. A mystic at heart, Friday's collaboration with astrologer Holiday Mathis explores Jungian themes, hinting at the spiritual depth she's weaving into her future projects. Her creative vision expands into the fine art as her marks of protection painting series, including the fiery day view of Vrata, recently garnered buzz at the Art Basel, Miami. The accompanying photo series made its debut at the World Economic Forum with the Art Talk magazine. An award-winning writer, fans can catch her witty cultural dispatches from NYC for the Times Square Chronicles. Wow, what a bio. Welcome, Friday. So happy to have you here. Thank you, Catherine. And I'm so thrilled. I love the work that you do. It's an honor to be speaking on your podcast. I just really want to hear about you and what you're doing, but I just have to share what the work that you've done for women who have had reconstructive surgery or have just had a mastectomy and decided to go flat and the artistry, whether you're doing a sort of a natural recreation of the body or putting your incredibly beautiful, detailed fine art on women's bodies, it is so healing. And I was just so honored to have a Friday Jones artwork on me. And I and I want to come back and do more. We talked about that. I wanted to share with everyone, you know, before I had my reconstructive tattoo done, I had just a recurring nightmare about being somewhere and being topless with this sort of deformity showing. And I would be just around people all of a sudden realize, oh my gosh, I don't have, I don't have a shirt on. And here they can all see, I used to call it my scarecrow. They can all see my scarecrow. And after I had the work done by you, that dream stopped. Something in my subconscious knew that I was whole again. Wow, what a testament, what a testimony. How could

A Nightmare Ends After Tattooing

SPEAKER_00 5:03

I never heard it like that before, framed within your subconscious? Thank you so much for that insight into that aspect of the healing. So talk to me first about your work that you're doing now and tell us all about what's going on. Well, I started doing ansectomy work. I'd been a traditional tattoo artist from the 90s, starting in 91 when I was at university. I was getting my philosophy degree by day, and then at night doing this kind of, you know, biker-y, gangster-y sort of tattoo culture. I was very angel, if we remember that movie, and then honestly by day and Hollywood Hooker by night without the prostitution, of course. Yeah, it was so penetrating. I had noticed the whole tattoo industry was quite macho skewed. I'm not going to say masculine skewed. It was really brutal macho skewed. And we saw an increase of tattooing in women, especially from 1970 when ERA first failed in Congress. We had never women started getting tattooed. And they would get these little small little bits like the lightning bolt or the cherries. Maybe we recall those, you know. And by so I mean this macho mask tattoo shop, and a women would come in and they'd want something small and dainty. And we were categorically not allowed to even entertain that. We would gaslight and you know, we thought it was the tr the gospel truth at the time that that you know, this will fade, it's gonna fall out, it's not gonna be, it's gonna like a bug smushed on you if you want a tiny little initial or something, like really ridiculous. And it was just a lack of skill from these

From Macho Shops To Safe Spaces

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colleagues of mine. They didn't have they weren't art trained, they were more, you know, craftsman driven, let's just, you know, stab it and slab it kind of mentality. And it wasn't great culture for women. So after my philosophy degree and and working in Hollywood, I was tattooing people at Angie and and others, and Jesus, and it was like, you know, women want this and they want a a great experience like we would have, you know, something intimate and something that we could be this women or talk about spirituality and sensitive subjects and not be these the brutality of the colleagues around you. You know, there's no human resources. There's just like they're gonna talk about sawing a woman's leg off. You know, just to mask with your just to have to show you the extreme of this and maybe why I, you know, am this appearing person in front of you while doing this kind of work. So we required that it'd get really tough. By 2009, I was tattooing a gay boy's in Chelsea, and they were like, look, we have a beautiful salon spa. Come and tattoo women here. And I was like, Oh Fifth Avenue, and it was so wonderful. And we had a party, a fashion show, to celebrate this idea of tattooing on Fifth Avenue, had never been done before, this upscale mentality. They ate it up with a spoon. We made international news, we had all the models come and tear their clothes off and for their business suits and reveal their true selves underneath it, and men and women. It was really fantastic. So by 2010, 2011, I'd become an established artist in Manhattan. It was illegal to tattoo until 1997, right? So yeah. Oh, a plastic surgeon had come in and he had done it was in a salon spa and he had done the brass reconstruction of one of my colleagues. And he said, My patients would love this environment. He's like, and I hate to tattoo. And I said, Dr. Lerman, why why are you even tattooing? He said they they they made us tattoo in medical school, they made us uh rub the ink on their brass and then grinding in with a machine, which is if anybody's been tattooed, that is the opposite of of a technique that's just basically turning women into hamburger, you know. Oh, terrible technique, uh unconscionable technique. So I was so grateful for Dr. Lerman. He brought in his first patient, sent them to me. Now these women had to pay out of pocket, but suddenly I was doing two and a half inch circles. Such impact, such impact, Catherine. I can tell you, I've done like all the cool phoenixes and the glowy skulls and the Tasmanian devils, but this stuff, boy, really, really set me. And from then it evolved into a scar covering. And what can we do with the visual art of it and versus straight up Trump Louis is the name of the style that we use where it looks like a three-dimensional protrusion of a nice tender bit of flesh that we were all born with generally. So that's that's that's the evolution of it, and it really is life-changing, it really is. For me as well, working with survivors, I was

When Medicine Meets Tattoo Craft

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so beat down by this culture, as probably we all are feeling right now as women in the United States and in the West. But this was kind of my upbringing. I'm a from a Pentagon family, like women were really discarded in my family. You know, we were to serve and serve at the highest levels, but still defeats you as a human, you know, and then to be able to kind of rise with you survivors changed my life, gave me a whole new meaning in my career and extended my career now about 15 years. I'm quite old to be so active as a tattooer, and I'm so grateful for my survivor women who march along right flat next to me. So when you and I first met, you explained to me, and at that point I was still in school to become a hypnotherapist, and you explained to me your experience with hypnotherapy. Do you want to share a little bit of that story? Life-changing. My hypnotherapy. Now, my poor deceased mother, just a fashion model and a ruthless killer and a donkey addict, you know, so terrible. And I had so much to discard in life and so much therapy. And no matter what, I keep repeating these cycles and these patterns, even though I was a spiritual person. I thought I was doing all the work. And it wasn't until I met June Milligan in Reno, Nevada, and that was 2005, I think, right at Hurricane Katrina, and got hypnotherapy, broke me down and rebuilt me. I learned EFT in that experience, emotional freedom technique. And I just, it was like psychic surgery, is the only way I could describe the radical shift my mind was able to make through hypnosis. I got into meditation from that experience. I was able to do a fellow Abraham Hicks around the same time. My hypnotherapist June got us in Abraham Hicks, and it was me and my Hollywood girlfriend had gotten her. And I'm going to talk about Nevada one more uh just to make it a point. Nevada has the least amount of American Medical Association interference in the entire country. So it's just a very libertarian state, right? We have sex trade is legal, gambling's legal, and alternative medicine is largely

Hypnotherapy As Psychic Surgery

SPEAKER_00 11:44

legal there, you know, encouraged. So we're having Eastern European Asian practitioner doctors come to Nevada. The only time I've ever been to Nevada was my dear friend is from Elko, Nevada. Yeah. And when she turned 30, we flew there and we went to the annual Cowboy Poetry Festival, which happens every January in Elko, Nevada, and it was an incredible experience. So many reasons to go to that region. And you're talking about the Sierra Nevadas, right? So really high crystalline content in that. You know, we have old growth forest right there, like Tahoe. A wellness retreat in Elko is is highly recommended. Yeah, 100%. So I just wanted to speak to that because I wish we had more of that available. But the work that you're doing here, especially on the East Coast, which is maybe more conservative, you know, you're really making inroads. Let's talk about feminine wisdom too, and right bringing, you know, healing, uh complimentary medicine as well. So yeah, leave them from the front with that. But do you still do the EFT National Freedom? A little bit. I do, I I recommend it to all the collectors and my besties. And I get to, especially having so much success on paper, I could just be really woo-woo and freaky as I want to be when I speak to people, and I and I leverage that as much as possible, if that makes sense. Because what we're talking about is so uh non-empirical, right? And it's faith related, and faith is subject to the individual. Faith is experienced. So we can't specifically preach about it into the world unless you want to have witness testimony. So, you know, we try to say on paper, we only do after the fact, oh, the heart rate has gone down, oh, the blood work is is leveling out, those kind of things. But when we work in faith and we see the the changes it makes in our consciousness in reality, you know, transferred into reality, there it is. You know, we can move forward. I love that. You're blowing my mind right now. I have so many things to think about. So talk to me about your faith and how that blends into your artwork that you're doing. You're doing fine arts more now. Yes, yes. It's aging into the dream. Honestly, I always wanted to be like a fine artist as a kid. My mother was a thwarted artist. You know, I think that was a huge crux of her problems, of her addiction, I think is uh, you know, a lack of spiritual outlet and creative outlet. So that right there, hand in hand, as I'm speaking to you, I'm understanding that more. So for me, I'm on the let me use a Christian image with this, like the sword, the flaming sword of you know, the guardian of the gates, the angel. And Jesus said, I come with a sword, not to unite, but to divide, as you know, separating the wheat from the chaff. And so at this point in time in history, what I get to with my view is is the warrior woman, is the colleague nature. And feminine rage has been so marginalized, you know, and then transmuted like so lower level. And the only way to get that kundalini, that that fire up is you know, through some kind of effort where depressions are easier for families to manage. It's better to have a depressed kid in his his or her room, you know, than to have a raging kid. Because rage is a higher vibrational state than depression. So our you know, the healthy narcissist leaning edge that we're feeling right now wants everybody to be down and depressed, but this is way more fun and exciting. And from rage,

Faith Feminine Rage And Fire Imagery

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we can get to anger and we can get to acceptance, and then we can get to to where we can really transmute the energy. So, my spiritual vibe in my work is is fire and the cleansing flame. And I'm using smoking a lot in my imagery, a throwback to model mommy and her you know means of keeping her weight down with cigarettes. A lot of spiritual philosophies use smoke as an image of mysticism, of the veil of consciousness. And we can even say in modern terms that cigarette smoking was glamour. So the same kind of thing, like you're making this hazy veil uh between yourself and reality, and always getting a stage how you want the world to perceive you and how you want to approach the world. So I'm doing that. My women's, they're calmly smoking cigarettes while things are burning around them, their hair or you know, the Christmas tree or whatever it is. I'm and um and it's it's a thrilling process. It feels great. And I'm getting some traction on it. We're having a show in Tribeca uh at OneSpace Gallery, women-owned gallery for International Women's Day. I think it's to start to debut my series called The Smoke Show. Welcome to the Smoke Show, which is a euphemism for hot women. We'll hear in like NFL and things, right? Macho culture. So if you're in New York City, we'd like to see you next Friday, March 7th, the International Women's Uh Art Show at One Space Gallery. I love it. I love this theme that you keep taking this idea of the macho negative interpretation of femininity and utilizing that and switching it around and throwing it back as yes, I want to make it and put it back out there and claim it. Yeah. Yeah, sparing when we again we have like Kali with these great images from from uh religious history, collie and and our volcano goddess in Hawaii. I love her, though, I love this goddess so much, but anyway, so we have these wonderful explosive goddesses, as a bleeding culture. Why wouldn't we deal, you know, talk about this? Yeah, and I'll tell you what, the millennials and the Gen Zers are so bold and brave. And you know, they granted they stand on the shoulders of giants, but they inspire me to be able to put this work out there and find an audience

The Smoke Show And New Fine Art

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and feel like I have an audience where we couldn't before. We were so it was crushing to compete with men. And and you know, I love my male allies, and I can't get anywhere without my masculine allies, but yeah, you know, it was it was Hollywood, gay men culture ran us, art fine art, gay men culture crushed us, and you know, uh that is as we have our advocates, uh, you know, and our advocates are ourselves ultimately. And millennial girls out earn millennial boys for the first time in history, generation.earning men, a woman's generation, five cents on the dollar. So that's never happened before in history. I didn't know that. That's that's amazing. Forged magazine 2012. It was girls then, but now they're millennial women out-earned boys for the first time in history. And same month and year, Catherine, March 2012 Harris poll released a study that for the first time in history women were more tattooed than men. So parallel, yes, we have a synchronistic parallel between earning power and body autonomy. Go figure, right? Go figure. Wow. So you also have some spent some significant time in Montenegro, is that right? God bless it. So Milo, that all happened right around 45. I was I was really enjoying the height of my fame, and it was exhausting. I'm tattooing so much, and it's really hard on the body. And I knew that I needed to start to think about my retirement. We hadn't had health care, you know, in this country. I I as artists, we just we used to not functioning without healthcare until 45. I'm like, I have to think about this. What am I gonna do? And I was looking at the Hamptons. I thought the Hamptons would be a good spot. I'd already been on Fifth Avenue, so we're just gonna go to the higher market, and there's no studios there yet. So and I went to the Hamptons and I met a gallerist there, and they said, you know, because I also was looking at fine art, like aging into fine art. So I thought that would be a good position. And the gallerist said, Do you know there's more fine artists in the Hamptons than anywhere else in the United States per capita? And I said, Oh, what he said, because they sell directly. It was a she said they sell directly to the clients here. We're so intimate and small. You you just said, Oh, look at my barn, look at my paintings, you got a big mansion, you know, come over. So I was like, ah, and it was so cold in the Hamptons in the winter. I was like, Yeah, I really wanted some, I really wanted space, some uh a lot of nature around me. So I because of my success on Fifth Avenue, I'd

Montenegro Healthcare And Legalizing Tattooing

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been sort of getting flown around by clients around the world. And I had my one darling girlfriend, Veronica, had organized uh a little gal, Ellie, for her birthday. She's a little Russian oligarch gal, you know, and they were in Montenegro, and she wanted to have me for her birthday to tattoo. I was like, where is this place? Is this Brazil? Like, where is this? And turns out it was this tiny Balkan nation, and they're across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. So it was a Russian Riviera back in former Yugoslavia age, and it was a stunning place. And let me tell you, we had a brand new super yacht marina there and a beautiful medieval village. So at the time, this was 2012, and it was it was 500 a month for for a two-bedroom apartment on the Riviera. And there's a high value client base and a nice normal olive trees and medieval architecture fortresses. It was just, and the people were wonderful and socialized medicine. Most important thing was socialized medicine. And I fell in love with the place, it really ticked all day. They fell in love with me, thank God. And um, I started to endeavor to to hop over there. Just would do again, Pentagon Brat. So I went over and just did recon, you know, a couple times a year and got myself situated. I had wonderful luck in the anchor for their 60 Minutes program. Alexandra Nedic fell in love with me and supported me and helped me essentially legalize tattooing in this country, which is a whole other story. But yeah, I managed to run a monopoly, legalize my industry, and give them the blessing of this art form for good or for bad. Because uh now it's an explosion of tattooing over there. But yeah, that was from the pandemic. But yeah, that's my little home away from home. And now my North Star as I work here in New York and see my my patient gals and work this fine art. So I have religion and it's uh thank God for this. For my taxes, Catherine, I pay 137 euro a month. I get full medical and a pension. Well, I mean, to be honest, when you have like the midlife flip and careers like I did, and you go from working in the corporate world into becoming a hypnotherapist, it's different, it's different too. You know, there you're you're a solopreneur and you you're on the uh healthcare market and it's just insane from New York City because I would not be in this country now if it wasn't for the healthcare that I could get from from New York City. Yeah. 100%. So tell everybody how they can find you. I am easy to find. I'm on the internet at www.fridayjones.net. And you can see me, I keep my social media active through Instagram, FridayJones NYC. And yeah, and on YouTube, I have a YouTube channel too, Friday Jones USA. And if somebody wants to have you work on their body, you can reach me at my website. I have an app there that you can just book in either a virtual or a direct appointment with me. I have a private studio in my Upper West Side apartment that is adjacent to Central Park and the Hudson River. And yeah, right there next to the Natural History Museum. So it's a great trip in town. If we have a lot of uh gals coming in from other places and have their beautiful, you know, the ritualized experience together, please reach out to me and we can make a plan. So I want to just go through as you know, the end here. If you could talk us through when you work on a woman who's had a mastectomy, when what that process is like when she comes to you. From my own experience, you were so intuitive. So I want listeners to understand what it's like if they come to you for that healing process. I can understand it's it's so scary.

Where To Find And Book Friday

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Tattooing is so weird. I was terrified of tattooing. I hated tattoos as a young person, and I was uh a professional track as a young person as well. And an officer, I was an officer's wife, military officer's wife, when I was young. So I and I completely understand how alien it can be for some people, despite its popularity today. So, first of all, I want to say that the hospitals since 2024 have really doubled down on keeping tattooing in-house. They're going back to like kind of just throwing machines at their nurse practitioners and going, go to town, just do the tattoos. And this is something that is hidden mostly, that women don't show each other. You can't go, hey, is this a good heel? Is this the way this is supposed to look? So, you know, they're leveraging that and collecting on insurance side up to like six grand per. So there's so it

What Mastectomy Tattooing Is Like

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it and they can charge every time. I had nurses telling me that they had to do tattoos six times on women, which should be just be a 90-minute process that's one and done. So, so beware of that, my ladies and then you gentlemen out there that need this kind of work. So, with me, the process would be if we have an in if insurance is able to increasingly insurance is rejecting us out of network, okay. But we have I work with the Center for Breast Reconstruction on West 57th Street in Midtown, and they have wonderful staff there. You can speak to Jennifer or Alex and they can help you through the insurance process, in which case you would arrive at the office for nipples. We do a lot of mirror work. So if you recall, Catherine, we're in the mirror, and I'm getting behind you and seeing what you see. And I like to make like the little gestural marks, and then from there, I'll turn you around and we draw out your nipple shapes. And there's a lot of dialogue through this. So we're talking about your color and we're talking about your lifestyle, and we're talking, you know, the issues particular to mastectomy tattooing is especially if you're getting the yet flap where you're having fat tissue replacing your breasts. We have we had a big problem in pandemic with the pandemic 10 pounds that people put on. It went straight to the breasts and it would explode the ink out. So just like a blowing up a balloon, when you marker a balloon and it's blow it up, the ink, you know, you'll see the spreading happen. And the body can deteriorate the brown pigment. Brown is our one of our more destabilizing, it's not the best word, right? Sometimes it's it should easily be broken down by the body, by sun. That's why permanent makeup. It's just the same with no with traditional tattooing. These eyebrows and things, if you're using browns, they're they can deteriorate more rapidly than the rest of the pigments. So we want to be very careful about weight gain, great inspiration to stay fit and strong, right? With this kind of work. And so from there, we get your drawing done, we lay it down, and then it's about maybe 20 minutes for the first one and 15 minutes for the second one. Once the first is this, whatever happens in art and creativity, when you're doing the one, you get the formula down, the second one's faster. So we get 90 minutes for that procedure. For as a tattoo artist and a classically trained fine artist like myself, this is not rigorous work, and it shouldn't be for you either. It should be we're talking, we're laughing. I have even a right, I even have a little gal, I love her so much in uh on our Instagram, and she's we're doing uh she's on, she has nipple tissue, and we're just using some illusory image to make a protrusion on her nipple tissue that hadn't remained. And she's talking and laughing throughout it. So, so right, it's minimal. It's about maybe akin to a bikini wax and discomfort. The last thing we're talking about is the healing, and which case, if we're going for a 3D effect, which is we're using on your flat surface, non-reconstructed nipple surface, we're creating the highlights, low lights, and mid-tone values that look like a nipple is protruding from your breast. That healing we could use uh the second skin sort of bandage, like a tegoderm, and that would be I like five days on that, and it's it's so great because it's very easy to heal. You take showers and you can sleep on your tummy and all these other considerations. You know, if you if you're tattooed, we don't want you sleeping on your tummy because the stitch you fixes scab onto your sheets, and so you wake up with little nipple impressions on your sheets, so we don't want that. But if you have a reconstruction where we're repigmenting a nipple that a surgeon has created, then we need to use a traditional tattoo bandage, which is a non-sticky bandage and non-sky, leave that on for just like an hour or two till you get home, and then you'll use a protocol. I like a cocoa butter or shea butter natural product. Loxiton has a great little uh lip balm for a shaved lip balm that you use as your dedicated healing ointment. So you can just keep it in your pocket and moisturize your nipples for about 10 days until the flaking stops, and and that's it. Then you get to you know go topless on the Riviera and just use your sunblock. I like a sunblock on the nipples for that, ladies. You get it? Well, and I do have to explain for people who are not familiar with this that breast reconstruction and breast augmentation are two totally different things. And when you have a breast reconstruction, often you have strange ripples or marks or whatnot. And so I can see why so many women like to have the additional artwork to take away that focus. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Hard on it's so great, Catherine. It's like it's the women who run with the wolves. I'm gonna say it's like it's the ones who really have been, I don't know. Speaking of somebody who didn't like tattoos and now is a complete advocate for it. It's just this I feel like in that sense, when you're leaning that direction, you become we've just become more of ourselves and the the myth of ourselves. And uh that that's an interesting distinction because even with the with the Little Reconstruction, we are becoming more of ourselves like that. We're coming back to that feeling of whole wholeness. And this one would be, I would say, rise of the goddess within. If you're really going to create yourself as this, as an art piece, you know, then then uh yeah, that's just brilliant. I just uh we had a wonderful gal last month who brought her two lawyerly daughters to get tattooed with her, and they all she had she's the professional woman, a professional Jewish woman in Washington, DC. Like she's not messing around, kind of gal, and adorable, redhead, you know, and ready for action. She, you know, lost her husband and she was ready to get back into the dating pool. And she was a unilateral mastectomy, which is a one side. And she went with she loved the iris. And the iris is such a nice, fertile, foldy flower, if we think about it. And it and we added uh cherry blossoms with it. And I think that was it. So I love to get into the symbolism of these. I'd love to speak to the symbolism of life, too, of interpreting life, just like we would read a book or a dream. And it's really um giving myself giving as I got so much insight into you know the supernatural and the mysticism of all the things that I hold dear, and being able to speak to professional women who haven't necessarily had

Symbols Flowers And Becoming Whole

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been able to enjoy that part of their lives, you know, especially being wives and mothers and employees and bosses, to be able to kind of to dig into the subconscious, this we would call this the catonic side of the human condition, this this um the prehistoric side of us, right? The shamanistic side of us, which is this working there in our western culture. And yeah, so we so the the iris had symbols of royalty in there, the purple color and the trident. We'd see like the the uh for like the fleur de lee with that kind of shape. So there's a symbol of power in that, which was very was perfect for her. And then we added the cherry blossoms, which a lot of survivors love to get in the in the east, especially in Japan, cherry blossoms symbolize the the fleetingness of happiness and the fleetingness of nature and reality, and that we must stay in that present moment and enjoy them. So we see cherry blossoms all throughout breast reconstruction work, and I'm always happy to see that. So, on top of these beautiful flowers that we enjoy, my darling collector gets to see herself as this ennobled, you know, revealed creature of authority and dignity and presence. It is just incredible. People play. And I have seen in your gallery too that you've also worked on women who have decided not to have reconstruction but to remain flat. And uh is there anything you want to add to that type of artistry experience? I love look, they got the flat toppers. They self-name the flat toppers brigade. We're not seeing enough representation of them, first of all, I want to say. And okay, so I'm in Montenegro and I'm explaining my work to my accountants' gals, who are Montenegro who's not getting tattooed culture. There's still very traditional patriarchal culture, and then my gals are all fascinated by this work naturally. So I'm 56, and my accountant was my age, and she said, you know, I wish that I could just cut these things off. She said, after a minute pause, my boobs got you know, like so some hype will even say, like, we get these, you know, battle act boobs going on. You just like these lovers love it, but forget about this. So even even women who are, you know, not facing the life and death struggle of it are like, you know, I wouldn't mind flat topping it. 100% flat topping it. So I love the flat toppers. I feel like they got that chic, streamlined look, you know, they're not performative.

Flat Closure Pride And Freedom

SPEAKER_00 34:25

100% the opposite of that male eye, masculine eye performative work. And you know, and don't get me wrong, I love, I love it. You know, I love performing for the male eye sometimes, and I don't mind it 100%. But yeah, gotta be liberating, huh? Gotta be like a little girl, like we were when we were just running around free climbing trees or whatever we're doing. Yeah. Wow. This has been so eye-opening. And every time I talk to you, I feel like I'm just vibrating at a higher level. You just really are such an inspiring person and a lovely spirit, and you're so well-rounded in terms of you know, all of the things that you experience, and you you come across to me like you're generally, genuinely just delighted with life and with what you're what you're doing. And that's so wonderful. And as a person who is, I can say, anybody considering, you know, going to Friday, as somebody who's been there who is terrified and just you know, shell-shock, really, just to have that experience of this delightful, kind soul, uh, helping you become whole again. It's amazing.

unknown 35:39

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Thank you so much for your words, Catherine. I really appreciate it. Again, survivors invigorate me every day. And I'm so grateful for the for the community I have with you being able to, you know, have a little bit of a view into this special privileged world of transforming trauma into beauty, into life, and uh lead on. That's all I can say is lead on. You know, now more than ever we choose, and we must choose life, and this is where we stand. You've been listening to Hip Talks, original music by Tracy Moore and the Jazzy Fat Nasties, Podcast Editing and Sound Engineering by Zachary Trainer. If you like what you heard, please like and share and follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you make a comment, I promise I will respond. Kid would love to live your gifts again.

SPEAKER_02 36:40

Kid would love to live your gifts again.