About Me

Ciel Incarnadine is the artist name I have been working under for well over a decade now. I am transdisciplinary craftsman, an animist witch, an empirical learner, an activist and semiotician. These days, I am primarily a maskmaker, tattooer, and steward of land. 

I was born under the Andean sun, into a family of artists, educators and alchemists. From the beginning, I was drawn to the act of creation—building worlds, inventing languages, conjuring characters from dreams and shadows. My childhood unfolded across borders and in transit, shaped by displacement and the echoes of war. I was raised between places, carried by stories, rituals, and reinventions. Among masks, pigments, and the untamed wilderness, I moved through the hostilities of the world, finding myself at home in theatres, workshops, and kitchen studios, learning from mentors across various disciplines: fine arts, design, patternmaking, theatre, carpentry, metalurgy, sculpture, and film.

That multidisciplinary path has led me across many borders—working in Colombia, Panama, the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Spain. I’ve created for black box theatres and city-wide parades, underground installations and large-scale festival productions. My collaborators have included grassroots collectives, cultural initiatives, and established organizations like the American Museum of Natural History, the European Youth Foundation, MAP, Boomtown Fair, and the San Francisco Pride Parade. Whether designing performances, building immersive environments, facilitating workshops, or supporting research, I move fluidly between creative roles—but the work that guides me thrives outside galleries and formal structures: off-grid, ephemeral, and rooted in collective transformation.
 

In my personal work, I’m interested in what emerges when ancestral memory, sub-cultural narratives, and contemporary craft are allowed to inform each other without hierarchy. Born into a shapeshifting lineage, I work from the threshold of genres, identities, languages, and roles. My practice is guided by a relationship to transformation as both survival and spellwork, and shaped by experiences of fluidity—of place, of language, of body. As a queer and trans artist with a cross-cultural background, my work explores transformation, resistance, and survival through visual storytelling. These lived experiences inform how I create, who I create for, and the worlds I imagine. I create to plant seeds that grow in unpredictable directions. My work speaks across distances, dissolving the line between the sacred and the profane, refusing to live quietly within white walls.