A message discovered by the artist as a young girl, spray-painted on a park wall near her home in Fresno, California, in 1989. 

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When I was a little girl, growing up in a Christian household in suburban central California, I looked everywhere for things that didn’t quite make sense – especially anything that seemed mysterious or unexplained. I recall being fascinated by the brightly-colored spray-paint marks on my street, until I found out they were put there by city workers marking the location of underground pipes and cables.

 

But when I was 8 years old, I found something. I was walking by myself around the perimeter of a park near my house, when I found some very strange tagging on the brick wall surrounding the park. It contained unfamiliar phrases, such as “Every man and every woman is a star,” and “Holy holy holy are these secrets,” as well as an arrangement of astrological signs around a hexagram, several equations, and an unusual symbol that looked like a winged spiral. I ran home to grab a pen and paper, then ran back to the park to faithfully transcribe what I’d seen. I puzzled over my notes for years and years. 

I wouldn’t learn the purpose of these symbols until many years later, when I finally figured out the correct Google search terms to pinpoint exactly what the mystery tagger was doing. The written phrases were a clue that the artist was probably a follower of famous occultist Aleister Crowley, who developed a religion called Thelema in the early 1900s. Finally I was able to learn that whoever tagged on that wall back in 1989 was attempting something called the Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram to invoke the energy of Saturn. 

Looking back, it wasn’t the message itself which was so important – I never became a follower of Aleister Crowley – but the sense that there were people within my own community, and probably within every community, who were working in secret to develop and communicate their own hidden truths.

This experience led to a lifelong obsession with hidden messages, secret knowledge, and the occult, which has influenced my art and interests ever since.