This took me about six hours to build out by hand as a digital collage. It is not an AI image. I pulled every piece myself, cut it out digitally, resized it, layered it, textured it, moved it around a million times, and built the whole thing in InShot with basic photo/background removal tools and a ridiculous amount of patience.

Almost all of the classical art in it is Philippe de Champaigne. I picked him mostly because of the cherubs, skeletons, skulls, and how much death is just sitting there inside all that beauty. I love how they?re able to exist in the same frame without one sanitizing the other. That was exactly how I viewed Aileen.

Enough people commented ?SAINT AILEEN!!!? under the last post that eventually I was like, alright, fine, you have my attention!

Aileen may have been far from a saint, but I certainly don?t see her any other way. Aileen is not a clean story, nor an easy victim, an easy villain, an easy feminist symbol, an easy religious figure, or really an easy anything. Her story touches religion, punishment, survival, violence, innocence, guilt, redemption, damnation, and the lowest forms of depravity humans have to offer one another. I made her a saint because through all the odds, she still passed with grace and has managed, years later, to be perceived in a new light despite her crude demeanor. She was decades before her time in women?s advocacy, in our understanding of trauma, and in the idea that men cannot keep assaulting women without consequences.

I used Aileen?s gun instead of some random gun because details matter, and I wanted the object in her hand to actually belong to her story.

The rosary is intentionally weird. I used wooden marbles instead of normal rosary beads because ?losing your marbles? felt accurate given her trying time incarcerated and its impact on her mind. Putting some pristine traditional rosary in her hand felt wrong. Nothing about her life was pristine or traditional, so why would that be?

The chains are one of my favorite parts. One wrist is already being freed by an angel?s kick, while on the other side she is shooting the chain off herself. She is being helped, but she is also getting herself out of it. The doves are there because she is finally at peace, and the angels are there to welcome her to heaven, where she swore she?d go.

There are seven skulls at the bottom for the seven men she killed. May they all rot in hell if there is one.

I?m not interested in cleaning her up enough to make people comfortable with caring about her, or pretending violence disappears just because I have sympathy for the woman who committed it. Both things are allowed to exist in the same piece.

Cherubs, doves, rosary, halo, Sacred Heart, chains, gun, bones, skulls. The duality of beauty in death and darkness, and a rebirth of sorts. A saint card for somebody nobody was ever going to canonize or forgive.

Patron Saint of the Unforgiven

Aileen Wuornos