Spell bottles made by me!

In my introduction post, I mentioned my website Small Magics. I wanted to help you get to know me a bit better by explaining what that term means to me.

What is Small Magics?

From my bio:

Ciel is an elusive catdeer who likes to bite, romance, and talk about symbols & personal myth. She is a Black Caribbean, mixie, queer non-binary person who is slowly venturing out of the wilds of liminal spaces to create works that are conversations between love and desire, personal mythology, community care, vulnerability, emotional growth, and access/disability politics. She uses storytelling, immersive installation, game design, and film to weave together visionary worlds where consent, community interdependence, financial stability, and the celebration of many genders and kinds of beauty can be the norm. She believes stories can inspire us to demand more love, more care, more tenderness, and more celebration of our bodies by validating more of our boundaries or helping us to imagine and create more of the consensual intimacy we need.

To me, anything that makes the ordinary enchanting, sensual, and unexpected enriches life. My favourite films are those that have just a hint of magic to them. I find they lift my mood even more than grand sweeping fantasy because the small bits of magic seem more like they could show up in my life easily. It inspires me to think that magic is not all that removed from where I am now.

Small Magics are little bits of every day magic and enchanting things that make you feel like the world is more mysterious than you could have imagined.

Alchemy Moon by me!

What Inspired Small Magics?

The biggest inspiration for Small Magics are works of magical realism like Amélie or Chocolat. Sweet stories with whimsical touches that enhance the pleasure one gets from experiencing them. Like turning the world up just a bit into technicolour.

A lot of my art involves taking materials I've found in the world like paper, cardboard, beads, wire, dried flowers, old bottles, anything really.. and turning it into something out of a fairy story. A weird repurposed kind of fairy story... I've lived a life of scarcity and poverty, with lots of illness and awkwardness so my art is really not polished. Like my mind, it has rough edges and it's not always perfectly coordinated by I'm in the process of refining it. And it wouldn't have so much meaning for me if it wasn't made from the things I can find around myself easily.

Collages made by me!

Almost all of my art contains a game of some kind - some form of interaction that starts to connect someone experiencing it into a larger narrative. I love games that blur the boundaries of reality and remind us of our power to create an enchanting world full of art and magic. Even if I make one small move towards that each day, my next day will be even more surprising.

Thanks for listening to my story!

~ Ciel