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Elle Azul Duncombe-Mills
The (Partial) Domestication of La Loba, 2023
Leather, Clay, Cloth, Sterling Silver, Nickel, Plastic.


There are legends of a wild woman who wanders the Mexican desert, dutifully collecting the bones of wolves and other creatures and singing them back to life. She is a peripheral being: a hag, a “criatura,” a hitchhiker, an edge-dweller. She goes by many names and wanders beyond borders, but everywhere she is known as the wild feminine incarnate — that aspect of our collective spirit that lives unbounded, fiercely protecting and nurturing the vulnerable, the instinctual, the natural.

She dwells in cities now, in hairless bodies with breasts confined. She lives in fear of being identified and hunted — for she is the wildness our civilized world despises. Yet in her spectral existence she still collects; an artificial ecosystem leaves artificial bones, and those are what she finds. She desperately wills them to breathe, to grow a wrapping of muscle and flesh, to live.

She is buried deep within me, and within you, and still she seeks to resurrect the wildness of the world.