Visual Art Informs The Haunting Beauty Of Queer Genre-Bending Singer/Songwriter Elizabeth Wyld’s New Album ‘Delicate Creatures’

A woman dangles a lit cigarette in her hand as her nipples peek out just above the bathwater. Two butts are discarded at the base of the bathtub. A nearly empty bottle of red wine and a bottle repurposed as a vase with two red tulips, one suspended in air as if it’s just been decapitated, rest on the edges of the tub. The woman unapologetically gazes directly at the viewer. Her time in the bath is an escape from the mundane and her habits aren’t yours to judge.

Danielle Orchard’s Two Bathers (2021) builds on the vibrant colors and fierce brushstrokes of Fauvism to gain a contemporary feminist perspective on how women relate to each other and how they interact with art history. It makes sense that Brooklyn-based, queer indie-folk-pop-rock singer and songwriter Elizabeth Wyld, who hails from Virginia, found inspiration in the Indiana-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s visual narratives while creating her new 8-cut EP, Delicate Creatures, which will be released Friday on all platforms.

“When I saw Danielle Orchard’s work for the first time this past summer at Philips I was completely mesmerized. Her work is feminine and vaguely sapphic. Most of the subjects of the piece gaze boldly at the viewer,” Wyld recalled. “I chose this specific piece as I wrote most of the songs in my bathtub. At least, the bathtub is a starting point. I am a highly sensitive person and find much of the experience of living in New York to be over-stimulating and overwhelming but in the bathroom I find the calm that is necessary for creation.”

The deep and profound coexistence of music and visual art informs how we listen and how we view, guiding our emotions through sound and imagery as we imagine how each is imbued in the other. Music permeated every facet of work by Wassily Kandinsky, who was among the rare few to experience synesthesia, a neurological condition in which one of the five senses becomes cross-wired with another. Even without that heightened awareness, we understand how Wyld’s music collaborates with visual art.

Wyld’s oeuvre has evolved quickly since her debut album Quiet Year, which was dedicated to the year she endured silenced by vocal paralysis. Borrowing from her musical theater training, Delicate Creatures erupts with passion, showcasing an array of sensational women characters.

Love comes with a knife invites us into the primary psychopath mind of Villanelle (A.K.A. Oksana Anatolyevna Astankova), an assassin from BBC America’s spy thriller Killing Eve.

Wyld immediately drew inspiration from women portrayed in the transgressive black-and-white photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

“As I began writing these songs and noticed the theme that all of these women shared. There was a sort of tension, a bound feeling,” Wyld explained. “I think any sort of romantic relationship leaves us somewhat bound. We lose a part of ourselves, we become restricted in certain areas.”

Wyld took cues from Mapplethorpe’s Lisa Lyon (the first World Women’s Bodybuilding Champion) and Frank Diaz (a celebrated fixture of the 1970s gay disco scene). “I think they pair well together and they both have a sense of tension with their flexed muscles,” she said. “I tried to pay homage to these poses in my promotional shoots for the album.”

A visit to the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition at Tate Modern in London last spring found its way into the magical space between the dreaminess and realism of Wyld’s evocative songwriting which investigates her evolving gender identity and overcoming socially prescribed roles and representations.

Commissioned for the June 1965 cover of a prestigious modern art publication, Untitled (Woman’s Face Covered by a Rose) by René Magritte conjures ambiguity and depicts the bust of a woman whose face is obscured by the artist’s recurring rose motif.

“As I’ve attempted to develop a sense of self over the past couple of years, I feel that what I present outwardly is a highly-conditioned, highly-coiffed version of a ‘woman.’ What does that even mean? Binary is hard-wired into me and I am trying to deprogram it,” Wyld said. “I see myself in this subject. The viewer can’t see her mouth or hear her or take in the words coming out of her mouth but they can admire her beauty, the gentle curl of her hair, her smooth skin. The red curtain reminds me of the proscenium curtain one finds in a theater that reminds me that many of us cisgendered women are playing a character when we present ourselves to the world.”

Oscillating between the dream world and reality became a collective coping mechanism during the pandemic, as Surrealist art experienced a resurgence. Wyld embraced the “introspective and dreamy” quality of Tomasz Kowalski’s Untitled (2018) which also hints at gender fluidity. There’s a sense of the figures as multitudes of one persona.

“A lot of these songs were written on sleepless evenings during the pandemic lockdown; evenings in which I was bemoaning the fact that shows and opportunities were gone for the foreseeable future. It’s funny because my partner’s work wasn’t affected at all but the landscape of my world so drastically changed. It made me look inward, wonder what I was without my art, without an audience,” Wyld remembered. “Now that we’re past that difficult time I find myself hearing that aloneness in my songs like How Am I Still Holding On.”

We land gently from a dreamlike state onto a bewildering red velvet dining table flanked by fuschia curtains dragging on the floor. We imagine the women of Delicate Creatures gathering in the theatrical scene depicted in Will Colenso Creatures of Habit.

“I think his work is very special. His artist bio calls his work a ‘highly personal invitation for people to linger in an otherwise transitional state where questions are left deliberately unanswered,’” Wyld said.

Visual activist and photographer Zanele Muholi documents Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people throughout South Africa. Muholi turns the camera on themself in the Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) series. Wyld’s songs experiment with different characters and archetypes much like Muholi’s self portraits, which reference specific events in South Africa’s political history.

“In a different way this is what I’ve tried to do with Delicate Creatures. Step outside of myself and write, sing, and perform from the perspective of different people and characters,” Wyld revealed. “In my body of work Delicate Creatures, these characters are limited to very similar archetype, but I endeavor to expand upon this idea in the future, like Muholi has done.”

Cindy Sherman is an unrivaled chameleon, performing for her camera as myriad characters to subvert and contextualize constructs of identity, sexuality, and femininity. Sherman devoted three years to posing for a suite of 70 black-and-white photographs playing with conventions from 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films.

“While she sometimes portrays glamorous characters, Sherman has always been more interested in the grotesque,” Wyld noted. “The songs in Delicate Creatures also explore some more ‘grotesque’ characters who all share a common through-line of obsession. Sherman draws attention to the artificiality of life, much like how Delicate Creatures peels back the layers of stereotyped female characters, exploring more complex experiences of reality.”

Delicate Creatures focuses on women as victims, “often victims of controlling, obsessive relationships,” Wyld said. She found a source of empowerment to counter that tendency in the highly symbolic works of Copenhagen-based, internationally-renowned watercolor and ink artist Ole Aakjær, who celebrates the complexities of women to illustrate his own psyche.

While the title hints at fragility, the figure in Aakjær’s Broken Porcelain (2022) conveys feminine fortitude.

“I wanted to shake off any victim mentality I had found in myself during the writing of the album and take back control over my own narrative and my own fate,” Wyld said. “To me this piece by Ole Aakjaer does just that. It’s about triumph, femininity, and strength in softness.”

Listen for yourself. Come hear Wyld traverse genres and moods at the Delicate Creatures Album Release Party at Rockwood Music Hall on New York’s Lower East Side this Friday.