Conceptual Artist and Humanitarian. Intimate Partner Violence Advocate and Activist. Forging awareness and accountability while shining 💡 on Coercive Control and Narcissistic Abuse throughout our lives, in our home, the workplace, and our government. There is no peace without liberation.
Bug Art NYC shines light on Domestic Violence and Coercive Control while integrating today’s global issues from social change, climate change, and public health . With the leaf artworks, conceptual artist, activist, advocate and BugArtNYC founder, Gwendolyn C Skaggs, takes her art making and personal experience to a universal level while heeding the Scientists' warning to humanity on insect extinctions and political catastrophes. SILENCE IS VIOLENCE, produced by hornworms, combines the artist’s understanding of balancing opposing forces with her knowing to look deeper into causes that disrupt and destroy the path to a just life for all sentient beings, holding oppressive systems and perpetrators accountable.
SILENCE IS VIOLENCE: From Femicide to Genocide
From femicide to genocide, violence against targeted groups is sustained not only through acts of brutality but through silence, denial, and the normalization of oppression. While genocide and femicide are distinct forms of violence, both emerge from systems that dehumanize, devalue, and render certain lives expendable. They are connected by patterns of domination, discrimination, and the abuse of power. Oppression anywhere is oppression everywhere.
Silence Is Violence brings these connections into dialogue through a single leaf transformed into a public act of witness. Created with hornworms guided by a hand-cut template, the work combines environmental awareness with social justice, linking violence against people with the exploitation, domination, and destruction of the natural world. The leaf serves as both a biological object and a political surface upon which questions of power, accountability, coexistence, and survival are made visible.
BugArtNYC rejects the imposition of human constructs such as "insect talent" onto nonhuman life. Doing so reflects the assumptions of human supremacy by interpreting nature through human values rather than recognizing it on its own terms. Instead, the work exposes the systems that normalize violence and challenges the silence that allows them to persist. #insecttalent is synonymous with coercion and rooted in oppression.
The hornworms are not presented as the artists. They possess neither intention nor symbolic understanding. They simply eat according to instinct, consuming only what the template allows. The artwork emerges through the intersection of natural behavior and artistic intention. Interpreting their behavior through human concepts such as talent, creativity, genius, or authorship imposes human values onto nonhuman life, obscures the actual relationships at work, and reflects the assumptions of human supremacy, measuring nature according to human desires rather than recognizing it on its own terms. The demand to patent or otherwise claim ownership over the underlying natural process reflects an ideology of human supremacy, extending human concepts of control, ownership, and exclusivity to relationships that exist independently of us. Human supremacy does not end with placing humans above other species; it also begins by assuming that human ways of thinking are the measure of all life.
The insects are not the subject of the work but the living medium through which broader questions of oppression, power, accountability, coexistence, and survival become visible. The message carried by the leaf is neither decorative nor sentimental. It embodies the voices of those who have been silenced, disbelieved, erased, or forgotten. It speaks to survivors of coercive control and violence against women, to victims of femicide and genocide, and to all whose lives have been diminished by systems that depend upon silence to survive.
BugArtNYC is an interdisciplinary art project that examines systems of oppression through the intersection of environmental awareness and social justice. While rooted in the lived realities of violence against women and coercive control, the work expands to examine broader structures of domination, including femicide, colonialism, genocide, human supremacy, environmental destruction, the public health consequences of oppression, and the devaluation of life.
Accountability begins with visibility. The telling of survivors' stories is essential to recovery, to dismantling stigma, and ultimately to prevention.
Silence protects perpetrators. Truth disrupts power. Accountability is prevention.
A must read: Dr. Jane Monckton-Smith, The author and professor of public protection on the red flags of coercive control and how courts should change to give abuse victims an equal voice.
To conduct her study, Dr Jane Monckton Smith looked at all cases on the Counting Dead Women
Democracy Necessitates Resistance (w/ Roger Hallam) | The Chris Hedges Report
In his new book, Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion provides tools for effective resistance to climate collapse under repressive systems.
"In times of massive distress a society will fracture, along several key lines. One of them is towards internal destruction, personal suicide, nervous breakdown, domestic violence. Another fracture will go towards external hedonism, you know live now forget the future and another element will go into some form of collective cultlike behavior or some fascistic you know worship of death and what you know which is what fascism basically is. The last fracture will be the fracture that turns towards prophetic love of life and the human. It is naive to think that the others fractures won't exist."
AMIRror of DREAD
Palestine, Power and Control, Art and Liberation
Anita Hill's mission to end gender-based violence
Perfect Prey: Dr. Christine Cocchiola on Coercive Control (A MUST LISTEN)
5 Signs of Normal Jealousy vs the Start of Domestic Abuse
Six Women Describe What It’s like to Be Stalked
Scientists' warning to humanity on insect extinctions
Global Climate Change and Trauma
•How Narcissistic Leaders Present a Danger for Democracy
•Pathological power: the danger of governments led by narcissists and psychopaths
•Dissecting narcissism within politics’ highest ranks
•Narcissism: Why It's So Rampant in Politics
•Arrogant Narcissism: The Essence Of U.S. Foreign Policy
•How the ancient Greeks kept ruthless narcissists from capturing their democracy – and what modern politics could learn from them
Founder Gwendolyn Skaggs, in her studio cutting a template.
“Domestic abuse, also called "domestic violence" or "intimate partner violence", can be defined as a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner. Abuse is physical, sexual, emotional, economic or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person. This includes any behaviors that frighten, intimidate, terrorize, manipulate, hurt, humiliate, blame, injure, or wound someone. Domestic abuse can happen to anyone of any race, age, sexual orientation, religion, or gender. It can occur within a range of relationships including couples who are married, living together or dating. Domestic violence affects people of all socioeconomic backgrounds and education levels.”
A closer look at the 4-part cycle
The cycle of abuse, also sometimes called the cycle of violence, helps illustrate common patterns of abusive behavior in relationships.
It also helps provide clues toward a deeper understanding of why people experiencing abuse often find it difficult to break free.
“The advent of climate change era has been affirmed by various global processes including 21 May 2019 recognition by the Anthropocene Working Group of ‘human impact’ in bringing profound alterations on planet earth. It has emerged as the predominant ‘world problematique’. Though entire populations are affected by climate change, women and girls suffer the most. Due to their traditional roles, women are heavily dependent on natural resources. As already seen, as a consequence of natural disasters and during Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-21, women have faced heightened real-life challenges specially being vulnerable to different forms of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). They suffer from a lack of protection, privacy, and mental trauma. Women are exposed to SGBV due to weak or absence of social, economic, political security and the culture of widespread impunity to the perpetrators. There is double victimization of women both as human beings and because of their gender. Effect of SGBV is highly injurious and perpetual. A close study of four main areas of international law does not yield any international legal instrument that deals with SGBV against women during and after the climate change induced disasters. This is more ominous when growing evidence suggests role of climate change in exacerbation of SGBV against women and girls. Even texts of the three specific climate change treaties (1992 UNFCCC, 1997 Kyoto Protocol and 2015 Paris Agreement) do not address this issue. It has been given attention only through the decisions of the Conference of the Parties in recent years. Due to serious psychological and bodily harm SGBV causes to women, it needs to be explicitly factored in respective international legal instruments on climate change and disasters. Amidst ignorance, denials and lack of adequate attention as regards impact of climate change in exacerbating SGBV against women and girls from the scholars and decision-makers in the field, this study makes a modest effort to deduce and analyze – from scattered initiatives, scholarly literature in different areas, existing international legal instruments and intergovernmental processes – the growing causal relationship between climate change and SGBV against women and girls so as to suggest a way out for our better common future. It is a new challenge for international law that needs to be duly addressed in a timely manner.”
#climatechange
#intimatepartnerviolence
#coercivecontrol
#narcissisticabuse
#bugart
#hornworms
#insect
#gaslighting
#traumabond
#rapeculture
#mastermanipulators
#talent