Featured Artist: Trisheena Bolakale
Interview by: Karen Hunter McLaughlin
1. You have said that you are a newly self-discovered artist. What guided you towards your art practice?
Trauma and healing from it. I discovered art as a way to express feelings I could not verbalize, in an effort to heal wounds that I couldn’t see.
2. You’ve been an Artessa for a few months now, what is it about our group that you find helpful? What do you hope to bring to us?
Let me say that I have grown so fond of this community in such a short time. I hope to bring art, crafts and ideas that center on self expression, and the power of healing through it.
3. We share an adversity- anxiety. How does yours manifest and is art helping you deal?
Like yours, my anxiety is often physical. I need to move, from idea to idea. Concept to concept- even when I am still. I am usually working on 4-5 projects at once- rotating amongst them until I get bored. anxiety keeps my hands and my mind busy. Art gives them something positive to do giving a tangible result. It’s my way of making peace with God on the anxiety. Like Ma’am- if you’re gonna give me anxiety, at least let it be pretty sometimes.
4. One of those projects you’re working on is “Flowers Still Gotta Grow, can you tell us more about the work?
Flowers Still Gotta Grow encapsulates what it is like to experience childhood trauma and still grow through it. Adults who care for children don’t always realize the effects that their behavior—whether intentional or not—leaves on a child, unless that child then engages in their own destructive behavior. Addiction, untreated mental health disorders, sexual trauma, neglect, physical abuse, and emotional abuse are all conditions a child may experience and still grow within because they have to. It isn’t always pretty or linear, or some redemption story.
Flowers Still Gotta Grow isn’t a collection about resilience as a beautiful character trait. It’s about the necessity of becoming when nobody has created safe conditions for you to become.
Even in the roughest conditions—flowers still gotta grow.
5. Your work often incorporates unexpected or shocking materials and imagery. How does the process of creating the work help you communicate what words cannot?
Sometimes healing starts before you can identify the wound. Just like a painting starts before the brush ever hits the canvas.
Life presents you with a seed. It could be a flashback or memory. Your mind is trying to figure out what to do with it. Your body is trying to decide if it is safe or not. Your emotions remember this feeling and become uncomfortable. That’s where my art steps in. My art wants to grab the seed and turn it into a flower—immediately.
Healing begins when you decide to look inward and then decide that you want something different outwardly.
My art takes childhood trauma and translates it into a language palatable to those who may have never tasted their own blood after a slap. Not that I think you should—hell, I don’t even think I should have—but it’s reality. It does no one any good to ignore it, stifle it, or sugarcoat it.
You heal when you snatch your demons by the collar and tell them to their face that they have no place in your joy. Then you take that joy and love the hell out of it.
That’s my art: pain and power. Hurt and triumph. Holding many truths at once. Honoring the wounds and still being dedicated to healing from them.
And sometimes it asks you to sit beside me while I rock back and forth. I invite others to be a witness, not a sponge.
6. When someone encounters your work, what do you hope they feel or notice before they understand what they’re looking at?
Honestly, I want that person to see that there is happiness alongside sadness. That you can have pain and joy at the same time. They don’t need to compete. They can coexist. And they do, whether you give them permission to or not.
When I was 8 years old, my mother called me ugly. She and my dad thought it was the funniest thing. They called me Celie, as it was around the release of the movie The Color Purple. I went to the library—yes, at 8—and read that book. All 360 pages.
Alice Walker said,
“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice.”
As a child, purple flowers kept me together. Instead of navigating life from one trauma to the next, I was able to go from one purple flower to the next.
This is what I want people to see: You can see your trauma and still choose to SEE the purple flowers.
There is so much love there—and joy.
Elements for “Flowers Still Gotta Grow”
