Card 4 · Femessence Series · 2020
Seek
Caucasian background · Vaginal birth: No
This is the second portrait of the same woman as Card 2 — Retreat. Two sittings. Two moments in the same unfolding. Where Retreat captured the first gasp of recognition, Seek holds the fuller story — what she discovered when she stayed with the process, when she let herself go deeper. She came in embarrassed, giggly, reverting to the awkward teenager she had once been. She left feeling like a woman.
“It was like reliving that teenage time as an adult and being able to do it properly.”
Before I felt embarrassed, squeamish, shame, worried about whether mine looked right or was the right shape. I felt silly and giggly and resorted back to being a teenager going through puberty, feeling awkward and embarrassed and unsure of myself.
Now I feel like it’s been a real rites of passage process — like the conversations and opening up of feelings that I never had the words or space to express. It was like reliving that teenage time as an adult and being able to do it properly.
Learning that all vaginas are different, that every single one is beautiful and so perfectly unique in its own way. That we’ve been conditioned with so many degrading things about our vaginas that it’s no wonder so much shame and shyness is carried there.
I now feel like a woman, with my own beautiful flower that I feel more appreciation, love and respect for. And a new sense of love and comfort between friends by going through the process and having those conversations you so need as a young woman but rarely get to have. It’s been a really beautiful and healing process — has surprised me how much it has lifted and shifted things.
Seek is the impulse that brought her here. And this portrait is what happens when a woman follows it all the way through.
This portrait is part of the Femessence Women’s Celebration Series — a body of work by artist and arts therapist Caris Pepper honouring the sacred feminine through vulva portrait art. Each portrait in this series is becoming a card in the Femessence Vulva Portrait Oracle deck, coming 2027.
