The arguments in her Instagram comments over whether or not Nathaniel, aka @femalepentimento, uses AI to create her images feel paltry in the face of her work itself—the concept of “reality” frays at the edges in images that depict non-human nature as “awful” in the word’s original, 19th century sense: “filled with awe.” It makes sense that people might confuse the “awful” with the awful—to have to reckon with a reality just as legitimate as yours but which you don’t inhabit can be terrifying. She might feel alienated from some of the ways people appreciate her work, but Nathaniel might be in the same boat as you, scared enough to have to look away from her own creation.

Em Seely-Katz: What do you do when you make something that scares the shit out of you?

Nathaniel: Sometimes I have to step away—I'm kind of the same way with all forms of media as I am when this happens in my own work.

I’ll remove myself from the situation and come back later, once I’ve processed what it is I'm trying to convey, what I'm trying to capture.

‍E: Do you ever have nightmares that make their way into your work? It’s so intense to look at…

N: Funnily enough, I have this recurring dream where I'll have my phone out—I do a lot of walks in nature and take pictures with my phone—and there's a subject or a scene or something where I'm like, “Oh, I can't believe I'm stumbling on this. This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.” I'll take tons and tons of pictures of it. Then, I'll wake up and feel this intense sense of loss, like it was the most beautiful thing that I've ever wanted to capture, but I couldn’t in the “real world.”

‍E: Maybe it’s weird that I asked that question—your work isn’t totally nightmarish, just very visceral. Do you ever feel like you have a weird relationship with the way people view the images you make?

N: I struggle when there are moments in which an image is celebrated for reasons that I feel like I had a different take away from.

It's a weird result of creating work on the internet. I have to try to detach a little bit, with love, and say, “You know what? I can't control the response to this thing.” I can just do the work and move on.

There's this really fabulous author and creative named Rick Rubin who wrote a book called The Creative Act, in which he mentions that in fact, the audience comes last in the creative process. Maybe we can really only make work for us, and then everything afterwards is out of our hands—that's how I've reconciled that truth when I feel like things get disseminated and celebrated for different reasons than I initially intended.

‍E: Someone celebrating something you made for a reason that feels completely divorced from your intentions can sometimes feel worse than no one celebrating it at all—for me, at least.

N: Absolutely. A lot of times there will be something where I think I have an image that feels like a very poignant commentary on climate disaster or animal welfare, and

I receive a lot of positive perception for those sort of images and depictions,

but then I get a lot of SoundCloud rappers who will reach out and ask to use my images. On one hand, that's so flattering, I'm happy that the work is speaking to them, but it’s also like: what about this speaks to you? Is it the cruelty? Is it the domination? If that's the response, then it's usually a good indication to me that we're not speaking quite the same language. Usually after you get to chat with someone, you can tell what it is they're responding to.

‍E: I've never thought that much about the dynamics of creating images of cruelty and domination, but relating to the entity that is being dominated or victimized and then having to interact with viewers who might be on the other side of that interaction. What do you think makes you able to sniff out who is on the side that you also relate to of a dynamic like that?

N: If we're talking specifically about, like the forum of social media, we have a very myopic view of who a person is or what their beliefs and ideologies are. We can really only parse things from that sliver of information.

A lot of times, we have to make quick conclusions about other people, assume things, and then move on.

E: Maybe this isn't “good,” but when I know or assume that someone is also queer, I read their art in a more generous way instead of assuming that they're taking a stance that would exclude me.

N: Can I ask, does that happen exclusively online, or is it also something that you find happens when you're in the “real world”?

‍E: It’s not a question of clocking, for me—It's a question of “pronouns in bio.” If someone also has they/them in their bio, I'm like, okay, there’s something going on here! In person, when I'm having a more immediate dialectic with someone, I don't need that as much. I don't need the interpretation to be that facile, because they're there to speak for themselves, and they can respond to whatever I'm putting out—they're there in their full humanity, and I try my best to let them. But when I'm just seeing someone's work, divorced from knowing them or interacting with them, it definitely matters to me what their identity is. I don't think that's good or bad, but it's definitely a part of my experience.

N: It's one of those things that can help you navigate the online space with a bit less friction, right? When you have these obvious sorts of social cues, like pronouns, it feels like a sigh of relief.