Aleisa Miksad

Of all the internal mechanisms that drive us, perhaps the most primordial is the beast. We expel the animal, the bodily, the base in favour of the intellect, yet it is the beast that holds what is most irreducibly human—impulses and desires that precede thought: love, rage, care, protection, connection. The very thing we suppress is also the thing that touches what is most vital.

Says Aleisa Miksad of this work, "'Merkin II' reimagines the golden pelt from the Greek myth of the Golden Fleece through a feminist lens. The fleece emerges as an object of autonomy, reclaiming narrative from male-centred mythologies and reasserting the body and female agency as the framework through which meaning is constructed."