Iris Riddle

Iris Riddle

Collection

Bio

Iris Riddle is a Los Angeles born artist based in New York who explores themes of gender politics, speculative fiction, and the space between fine art and fashion in her collections. Using fantasy as mirror of reality as protest, she designs for the outcasts and the freaks.

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City of Angels: Goddess, Cult Leader, Whore

A fairy tale representational of the systems of abuse attached to being a woman, feminine presenting person, and trans fem in current society. The collection critiques cruelty towards the feminine through the eye of if angels came down to earth, how would they be treated? To be feminine is to be a goddess, cult leader, and whore.
Image: Look 1: The born again goddess

In which the angel is born to the earth pure and eager as a heroine savior. The angel is full of love to spread to the land that surrounds.
Image: Look 2: The collectively lost goddess

In which the angel begins to become lost in chaotic surroundings. Using the wick of the candle to guide, in the darkness the ruins morph and crack as the townspeople begin to worship
Image: Candelabra made at home, the real city of angels, Los Angeles. Forged and welded from scrap steel to create an abstracted and disturbed form. Spikes to hold candles at any size.
Image: Collection features textiles naturally dyed with fruit, vegetables, tea, and coffee, all substances we put in our bodies on a daily basis. Instead of polluting our water with harmful chemical dyes I believe there is an alternative that creates a more beautiful and ethereal result. Something that can be born with the earth and die properly in it.
Image: Look 3: The cult leader mocks the father

In which the humans make the angel a prophet. A living weapon worthy of shrines and spoken tale becomes twisted into something sinister. Temples of souls become hierarchical.
Image: Look 4: The cultish virginal whore

When all from the townspeople is taken further than harm the angel is stripped as an object of doting adoration now of fiendish desire. Meaning and wise intention becomes lost.
Image: The Prometheus Bag: A creature made of a silk organza shell and filled with scraps from textile waste from looks.
Image: Look 5: The godly rotten whore

The angel is now a body of blame and ill from slow deterioration. When all is taken and a creature that is othered, the only meaningful currency is the flesh. in small moments the angel reminisces of the love received clinging on to the former self.
Image: Look 6: The whore meets the end in smithereens

The soil in which the angel was born from as a gift from above is beckons the angel to return. The body decomposes back into an empathetic nothing hoping one day to be one with meaning again. The townspeople find themselves in the same ruins as before.
Image: to be feminine is to be inherently destructive.