For me, art is a rebellious act.
I've never wondered if I'm an artist… I was born knowing.
I work across canvas, skin, clay, and screen: painting, drawing, tattooing, ceramics, photography, and digital art. Not because I can't choose a lane, but because I don't speak in specific mediums. I speak in feeling. Everything I encounter to create with is just the tool.

My work lives at the threshold, the space between what shows and what doesn't. My subjects return again and again to emergence: women rising from roots, faces surfacing from smoke, figures caught mid transformation between what they were and what they're becoming. There's a duality running through all of my work that is not meant to resolve into easy harmony. Control vs freedom… Roots vs wings… Aflame but never burnt.

To me, art is how we hand each other our own private way of seeing the world. It's how I take whatever's been hardest to carry and alchemize it into something that doesn't just sit inside me anymore, something I can hold up and say this is what it's been like to be me, does anyone else know this feeling too? My hope is that someone someday stands in front of a piece of mine and feels less alone in whatever they're carrying or transforming into.
I'm based in Cashmere, where I run Inklinations, a private tattoo studio. I'm also co-founder of Make Your Mark, a Washington nonprofit dedicated to radical art accessibility.

Updates on my work can be found at @aliciamayeart on instagram

Website:
https://www.aliciamayeart.com/

Contact:
alicia@makeyourmarkpnw.org