the origins

some stories arrive in echoes.

01

This did not begin with art.

It began with stories.

Before the prints, before the ink, before the screens and sewing machines, there were fragments — half-written conversations, unnamed places, faces that only I could see.

I spent years building worlds before I learned how to pull them into reality.

02

At first, the work was private.

A way of giving shape to the things that refused to stay buried.

Over time, those fragments became images.

Then symbols.

Then an archive.

03

I have always been drawn to things that feel ancient — sigils, myths, archetypes, stories that survive long after the people who created them disappear.

Not because they offer escape,
but because they reveal something underneath us.

Something older than performance.

The tension that has shaped the way I see the world.

The restraint of it.
The transformation of it.
The violence of becoming something new.

04

Spade Dragon Studio was born from that philosophy.

The spade became a symbol of potential and restraint.

The dragon emerged beside it as a symbol of transformation and creation.

Together, they became the language of the studio.

05

Identity threads itself through everything I create —

not the version made for display, but the one that survives underneath expectation.

The self that emerges in silence.
The one that stares back when the mask has fallen.

Everything exists under pressure.

Bodies that transform instead of collapse. Faces that refuse explanation. Eyes that hold their ground.

Words were never meant to sit politely beside the image.

But to interrupt it.

Like a thought that slipped through at the wrong time.
Like a truth trying not to be noticed.

Some stories are invented.

Others wait to be uncovered.

This work has always belonged to the latter.

— Erin Gabriel