irene wilde.

Irene Wilde is an independent, avant-pop artist in Seattle, Washington. Her work speaks openly about mental health and its implications on self-worth.

Irene paints her nude figures open with their vulnerabilities, emboldened by their nakedness, and without stigma nor shame.

Her latest project "The Blackest Bile" - Melancholia, Spleen,
and Pyrrhicae - is out now.

You are not alone in feeling.

BODY

  • Melancholia.

    “An artist shares intimate details regarding the symptoms of her disorder. Disclaimer: underneath a haunt pop exterior lies gut-wrenching lyrical catharsis.”

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    Released September 10, 2020 independently as Irene Wilde’s debut, self-produced extended play. Written in the thralls of a bipolar episode, the four tracks vividly depict mental disorder and its subsequent symptoms. It is an extended play that both shares the intimate viewpoint of an artist coping with her illness, while simultaneously being withdrawn, anxious, and impersonal.

    Spotify 
  • Spleen.

    In a hauntingly raw production of sound and lyrical gravity, an artist offers up her pain, her spleen full of the blackest bile, in hope that you may too purge yourself of this.”

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    Released November 20, 2020, Irene Wilde offers up her pain in Spleen. Within her first full-length album, the blackest bile is ever present. It is in the gut-wrenching honesty of the lyrics; it is in this damning sense of grief in her raw, minimalistic production. But still, despite this feeling of struggling to stay afloat in that thick, opaque liquid of heartache and sound, it pleads with you to try.

    Youtube 
  • Pyrrhicae.

    “A woman frees herself of her own stigma as she dances around that self-hating pyre she once helped build.”

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    Pyrrhicae is not an album that jumps for joy and exclaims that all is good and fair. It is the complicated, bittersweet love story of trying. For that hope of life and love isn’t sequestered by any amount of madness. And to have been in the muck does not nullify you from being deserving of happiness. Pyrrhicae is Irene’s dance back to herself by finding the strength to be open & unshielded to the world so that she may experience that something other: the good too.

    Bandcamp 
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pyrhhicae x lyric videos

You're not alone in feeling.

I sincerely hope my art does not induce a feeling of despair. Due to the subject matter, I have composed a list of resources for you.

There is hope. You are not alone.

           

“I paint figures that make beautiful my own vulnerabilities. I sing about what makes me blush. This is me connecting in the way I know how. For these parts we tend to hide, they too have a desire to be known. They have a desire to be assured."

It began when I started making art that frightened me because of what truths it made apparent. I feared a lot then, and to some degree still fear a lot now. But those fears are perhaps different things entirely for I  am no longer afraid of being marked by my supposed shame nor stigma. But rather, continuing  to allow it to dictate what I will and will not love. Through art, I gained the ability to vocalize that which I’ve been told to hide.

Creating art has always been my way of returning back to self. It is confrontation through mediums – that act of forcing out how I feel, confronting what I do not want to feel anymore, and the nostalgia of a particular feeling. It allows me to acknowledge that I am me – hopeful, kind, and vibrant – but no one is absolute in only their positive characteristics. Additionally, I contain an internal monologue that can be distant, bound to apathy, and yet irrefutably still very much my own. My paints and sound materialize this internal conflict. My art isn’t the embodiment of Bipolar I disorder, it is the collision of our strengths we present to the world and our supposed weaknesses that we tend to neglect - of which still too very much  need to be loved. 

My art does not depict good or bad emotions to have – but simply expresses that they are and attempts to validate those complications. I want to implore those who view my work to empathize not only with me, but with themselves for feeling something we can’t always quite understand. My philosophy is to not simplify the lived experience – whether mental illness occupies any part of that – but to express our feelings and passions in earnest so that we may work through our own chaos and perhaps find some beauty in it.

With love and hope,

Irene Wilde.

Artist Statement

Irene Wilde news

I am here now.

Feature - Silk Road Gourmet

Small Town Radio No. 3 - "Irene Wilde is a multitalented renaissance woman based in Seattle, whose music and art beautifully portrays a raw, destigmatized expression of trauma and healing through non-sexual nakedness...."

Interview - Divide and Conquer

Feature - Postcard Elba