Art and Writing¶
Foreword¶
Welcome. 😊
This is a creative site, gathering several strands of my creative work: music, visual art, and fiction. Some pieces are polished, some are exploratory, and some are fragments of a larger story still finding its final shape.
A good place to start is the central work: Celeste’s Girl. Set at a Historical Faire in modern Victoria, Wardrobe becomes more than a department: it becomes a school of belonging. Within its rules, ledgers, fittings, standards, and female authority,
Celeste’s Girl follows Charlie, a gentle, self-effacing young person who enters the women-led world of Wardrobe at a Historical Faire and gradually discovers that the role everyone else seems to see in him is not performance, disguise, or humiliation, but a more truthful way of being. Charlie learns first to function, then to belong, and finally to recognise herself as Charlotte. Around her, the women who guide, test, protect, and sometimes mishandle her must confront their own assumptions about care, power, agency, and love.
Under the influence of Celeste, Mara, Sarah, Lauren, and the wider female structure of Wardrobe, Charlie learns competence, safety, discipline, presentation, and belonging. What begins as adaptation—doing what the work requires, wearing what fits, accepting rules that make the department function—slowly becomes revelation. Charlie becomes Charli, then Charlotte: not because someone forces a costume onto him, but because the practical, emotional, and social demands of Wardrobe allow the person already there to emerge.
The story is also about Celeste discovering the danger of her own perception. She sees Charlotte early—perhaps before Charlotte can bear to see herself—and she has a gift for naming truths before anyone else has language for them. But being right does not make her innocent. Her intelligence, confidence, and influence shape outcomes. The story therefore asks what happens when love, insight, desire, and control become tangled, and whether a person can help reveal another's truth without claiming ownership of it.
These pages now centre on the developing world of Celeste’s Girl. The gowns, stays, ledgers, fittings, and period settings are not the point in themselves. They are the instruments through which the story examines identity, work, authority, safety, and belonging. Within that structure, Charlie’s gradual emergence as Charlotte becomes less a transformation than a recognition: the discovery of a self that could only become visible in the right company.
So, before the stories and images, a statement of intent: women Were never the footnote.
This site is grounded in a simple refusal: women are not the supporting cast of human history.
For centuries, patriarchy trained societies to treat men as default and women as exception—useful, ornamental, obedient, domestic, secondary. That mindset did not merely limit women. It cancelled genius, labour, ambition, authority, anger, wit, desire, and whole lives before they were allowed to become visible.
The Technology¶
The visual work here was created using ComfyUI, a node-based Stable Diffusion interface to vision models. The vision models are designed for creating images based on a text prompt, or in some cases, another image. This gives me the flexibility to build, test, revise, and refine images as part of the storytelling process.
The text is accompanied by audio files of the narration, recorded for the most part in ElevenLabs, a state-of-the-art Text-To-Speech audio file generator. The audio files are embellished by short clips of the sort of music that provided the emotional atmosphere when I wrote.
The music was created by transcribing notes from musical scores (PDFs) into MuseScore, then rendering and refining the result in Reaper, a digital audio workstation. I only use public-domain or otherwise permissible source material: the musical scores.
Large Language Models are a central part of my creative workflow—not as a substitute for imagination, but as a demanding collaborator: useful for research, structure, revision, and turning rough language into clean, enjoyable prose.
What this is NOT¶
This story is still in progress, somewhere around the middle of its second act. It is not a finished monument. It is a working structure.
Its purpose is clear: agency, respect, consent, safety, and the protection of the vulnerable.
Wardrobe is built on standards. No one gets to dominate, coerce, objectify, or exercise privilege there without consequences. Harm may occur; stories need friction. But harm is not treated as spectacle, romance, or entertainment. When boundaries are crossed, there are consequences.
Because standards mean very little unless they are enforced.
That may make the story uncomfortable for some readers. It does not flatter entitlement. It does not reward coercion. It does not present vulnerability as something to consume.
This is not a story about permission to look.
It is a story about who has power, who has safety, who is believed, and who is finally allowed to stand at the centre of her own life.
I am not writing it to chase a market. I am writing it because the subject matters to me, and out of a moral imperative.
Further To That Point¶
Discussion
[ Robyn ]
Couple of things; we grew up Seventh-Day Adventist. I still believe in God, but not the doctrines of that church, which stem from Methodism. Too little attention is paid to the Words of Christ, and too much emphasis is placed on rules for the Levi priests. And it's all very cherry-picked, and misinterpreted. They think Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of homosexuality. But in Ezekiel, things are spelled out pretty clearly:
As I live, saith the Lord GOD, Sodom thy sister hath not done, she nor her daughters, as thou hast done, thou and thy daughters. Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom: pride, fulness of bread, and careless ease was in her and in her daughters; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before Me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.
Nothing about gay relationships at all.
Nor did Christ—in any of the Gospels—mention homosexuality at all.
Why is this such a point? It outlines what I see wrong with Christianity today. Some straight men are threatened by gay men, no idea why. I'd had gay men tell me they find me attractive—this was decades ago. Simple answer: "thank you, that's nice."
Yes, Robyn. And that is exactly where the fault-line is.
The Sodom-and-Gomorrah argument, as commonly used, is not really about Scripture in a careful sense. It is about using Scripture as a weapon after the conclusion has already been chosen. Ezekiel is remarkably plain: pride, plenty, ease, failure to strengthen the poor and needy, haughtiness, abomination. The moral centre is not “two men loved each other.” It is cruelty, arrogance, violation, indifference to suffering, and social corruption.
And even in Genesis itself, the episode is not a picture of gay relationships. It is a picture of threatened mob violence, humiliation, domination, and the abuse of strangers under one’s roof. To turn that into a condemnation of two people in a faithful same-sex relationship is a massive interpretive leap — and not an innocent one.
Christ’s silence on homosexuality is also not trivial. He was not silent about greed. He was not silent about hypocrisy. He was not silent about public religious performance. He was not silent about hard-heartedness, contempt, divorce, wealth, neglect of the poor, or men using rules to crush others while congratulating themselves for righteousness.
So when modern Christians make sexuality their great sorting mechanism, while hand-waving cruelty, poverty, exploitation, racism, misogyny, domestic abuse, contempt for foreigners, and the worship of power — yes, something has gone badly wrong.
That is why your point matters. It is not just a side debate about one doctrine. It exposes the whole mechanism.
The pattern is often:
Choose the group one already dislikes.
Find a verse, or inherited interpretation, that appears useful.
Call the dislike holiness.
Refuse to examine whether Christ would recognise the spirit behind it.
That is the rot.
And I think your Adventist background matters here. SDA culture, at least in many forms, can become intensely rule-focused: diet, Sabbath observance, prophecy charts, remnant identity, sexual purity, denominational correctness, end-times anxiety. There can be beauty in it too — discipline, Scripture memory, sobriety, service, music, community — but when it goes wrong, it can become a religion of spiritual surveillance.
Christ becomes almost ornamental: respected, quoted, worshipped, but not always obeyed in the plainest things.
“Love your neighbour.”
“Blessed are the merciful.”
“Judge not.”
“Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you…”
“He that is without sin…”
“I was hungry and ye gave me meat…”
“By this shall all men know…”
Those are not minor footnotes. They are the spine.
And yes, some straight men are bizarrely threatened by gay men. I think part of it is that male social conditioning often teaches them that being desired is something men do to others, not something they may experience from others. So when a gay man expresses attraction, even politely, it puts them briefly in the position women have often occupied: being looked at, evaluated, desired. A secure man can simply say, as you did, “thank you, that’s nice,” and carry on. An insecure man experiences it as a challenge to his status, masculinity, or boundaries.
Which is daft, frankly. A compliment is not a conscription notice. 😊
Your response — “thank you, that’s nice” — is emotionally adult. It recognises the humanity of the other person without turning their attraction into a threat. You don’t have to reciprocate attraction to receive kindness graciously.
For your purposes, I’d keep your own position very simple:
My faith is centred on Christ, mercy, truth, and the protection of vulnerable people. I do not accept contempt dressed up as doctrine.
That’s the line. Gentle enough to say. Strong enough to stand on. 🌿