Cottagecore Rebel

“Cottagecore Rebel” is a meditation on reclamation, memory, and defiance. In this mixed media work, I layer historical photographs of Black women — many anonymous, many forgotten by dominant historical narratives — onto a textured, earthy backdrop that evokes the warmth and domesticity of the so-called “cottagecore” aesthetic. But unlike the sanitized, nostalgic images often associated with that trend, these women tell a more complex story: one of survival, resistance, and self-fashioning within a society that sought to limit their visibility and power.
The materials I use — lace, copper, dried flowers, old book pages — are deliberately delicate, evoking femininity, domestic craft, and handmade. Yet through their layering, tearing, and metallic edging, they also suggest resilience, sharpness, and the capacity to withstand time. I want the viewer to feel both the softness and the steel.
This piece resists the flattening of Black womanhood into singular narratives. The women I collage here span time, class, and circumstance, yet they all look back at us with a shared dignity. They occupy space on the canvas not as passive figures, but as active presences, framed and celebrated. By blending the romanticism of cottagecore with the historical realities of Black women’s lives, I invite a reimagining: What does it mean to claim gentleness as an act of rebellion? How do we honor histories that were both beautiful and brutal?
Cottagecore Rebel is ultimately a tribute — to foremothers, to invisible histories, and to the radical act of making beauty out of fragments.