an interview with Makayla Armijo-Trujillo
FM: While working with Kleft Jaw Press, some of your paintings/illustrations were these ghastly figures with long appendages and they were seemingly disconnected from full ownership of their body, how it moved, etc. Was this period of your work a reflection of your struggles with RA?
MAT: "Definitely. I had been drawing and painting people in an elongated and grotesque style since high school. I was heavily influenced by the work of Basil Wolverton and Robert Crumb and other cartoonists in that vein and had developed an art style that felt uniquely my own. Large headed figures with deep-set eyes and exaggerated features were often the focal point of my work, usually about the physical effects of some sort of emotional pain. I really wanted to convey a sort of life-drained and worn expression in each character and I felt that I was able to express that. When I was diagnosed with my disability, my work took a personal turn. The people in my work were no longer a symbol of general emotional pain, they were the symbol of my pain.
I turned towards images of amputees as a metaphor for the helplessness I was feeling. I felt that my art ability was in someway my ‘phantom limb’. It became something that I always felt was there, a familiar part of myself, even when I couldn’t use it.
Hands had always been a favorite thing to draw. I found them delicate and charmingly expressive. It was a pretty cruel irony that I couldn’t use mine to draw them like before. So I dove into that imagery: What does it feel like to not have hands? The saying “the body is a temple” really haunted me. During the first year of my diagnosis I really felt that my body was a prison."
Makayla Armijo-Trujillo is a published writer and artist from New Mexico. Her work primarily focuses on her personal identity as a young disabled woman and her experiences with PTSD and chronic illness. She is a mental health, disability, and Autism advocate. She lives with her husband, son, and two rescue dogs. She spends her time arguing with strangers about the evils of AI, and speculating whether aliens are real or not You can find more of her work @instagram.com/fearwave
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