The Goddess Experience
The Goddess Experience is a five-part series of performances centered around the common theme of exposing powerful yet painful truths about life. Each production featured an autobiographical performance art piece written, directed, and performed by the series’s creator, Ebony Payne-English. To promote the ground-breaking project, we created a series of inspiring posters that highlighted each individual performance while capturing the essence of the entire body of work.
Inspired by the artist’s name, raw wood served as the primary visual element in our pieces. Throughout human history, people have used wood in some form or fashion to both create and destroy. A natural but precious resource, every piece of wood tells its own story through every knot, knick, and splinter, even down to its unique grain pattern.
Hand-crafted visual metaphors.
As a base material, we selected complementary pieces of Wenge, an African wood with an intriguing swirl of ebony and mocha in its grain. We carefully cut silhouettes in the likeness of both the artist and her daughter from each piece, leaving behind both a positive and negative wooden profile. To further enrich the visual narrative, we added striking visual elements to create powerful metaphorical associations and stimulate the imagination. Works of art in their own right, the resulting sculptures were photographed to create images that faithfully embodied the honesty, vulnerability, and creativity of the project.
