Sirena Pearl
My work lives where paint and code meet, and the exchange is bodily. I stretch canvas until it moans; it bleeds and oozes. I work at gestation tempo: washes wick inward, soaking dilates the membrane, and clots coagulate to seal it. Uterine pinks and arterial reds ring the Silicoil’s lip. In the studio, engines, shaders, and input maps sit beside gesso, clay, pigment, and canvas. I model interiors and generate renders that behave like ultrasounds, digitized membranes that claim to see inside while smoothing the body flat. I paint from those scans to give back life to the body that carries it, then return the canvases to the engine so their edges, drips, and ridges keep breathing on-screen. The process is reciprocal: digital simulations and physical surfaces iteratively shape one another; a glitch nudges the hand, the hand stains the code, and each pass reshapes the other.
As a student walking through my university campus I kept encountering anti-abortion posters that included fetuses floating in blank space. I compare this to ultrasound aesthetics, a less ideological image, which nevertheless shows cropped cords, monochrome voids, and isolated figures. That blankness producing alien silhouettes, echoes the space of the womb world in my work. But I populate this world with elements drawn from the fraught history of reproductive health. Fluids become architecture; foreign objects like IUDs become characters; Lysol recalls its history as a deadly contraceptive; tampons recur as icons; menstrual blood swells into rippling oceans; semen cools into wax; an orgasm erupts like a gushing waterpark.
The worlds I build are game environments without enemies, wins, or waypoints. Nevertheless violence is navigated, because it targets bodies, physical and digital alike, often via “neutral” source code that smuggles ideology. I invert controller mappings so the player’s agency stutters, sometimes disoriented. The point is to inhabit not to conquer. In Womb World the opening scene tethers the player to a giant hand in a bloodied bathroom; removing a tampon and dropping it into a toilet that refuses to flush. It pulls us through the vaginal opening into the first biome. Disorientation, not dominance, advances the experience. You arrive in a village of womb figures watching a candle drip white wax into a pond; on closer inspection, a figure milks a condom of the same substance into the pool. Approaching the flame, you become a human-faced sperm, “smelling” for eggs, drawn toward two ovarian figures cradling a cave with a copper IUD. Contact kills you. Copper is poison to your kind. You tumble into a yeast-infection party of bread and wine. The system then loops, linking narrative and bodily cycles. You navigate by being navigated: tugged, rebuffed, redirected by a living system.
Speculative fabulation lets these worlds rehearse autonomy under outside regulation. Painting returns the flesh and body where ultrasound aesthetics and anti-abortion image work flatten the womb into a passive vessel. In my games, the world is a living body; it cycles and unfolds as an interior stage with membranes that open, thicken, and refuse. It is a stage, but not staged for mastery.
