essential arts
JONAH WELCH by Elissa Koppel “I was about 18, 19. I was coming out as trans at the time. I started having these experiences in society that I could not reconcile with—things like going into a bathroom and being harassed or being misgendered all the time; things that were society-level problems; things that weren’t a quick fix, where there was nothing I could do. They would hit me really hard. I found drawing was pretty much the way I could get myself through that because I could take my experiences and change them with the drawing, or I could even just represent them in all their glory. It was a survival mechanism. I’ve been doing it ever since.” Jonah Welch is a transgender, nonbinary mystic and visual artist. I met them unexpectedly at the opening of their gallery at Black Locust Cafe, an excuse to see old friends. The show featured dreamy linear illustrations of haunting landscapes and towns, obscure bodies intermingled, and animals bent and moving in unanticipated directions. In 44 | m a d i s o n e s s e n t i a l s
their artist talk, Jonah spoke about their life’s work, the exploration and protection of all that is the divine nonbinary. While I still had more to learn about their work discovering the spiritual legacy of nonbinary people through several conversations, the first time we spoke was after their talk about a recurrent symbol in their work: horses. The symbol took years to show up in Jonah’s work. They had been drawing from the time they came out as transgender and, for a handful of years, was not doing well emotionally. “Now that I’ve been on hormones for six years, I see that transitioning is a trauma. There isn’t guidance on how to do it. All of a sudden, you have to let go of all these things and learn all these new things, and there’s barely anybody helping you. So when I first started, I had a lot of qualms with taking up space as a person who looks male-bodied or like a man. I started censoring myself a lot, changing some of my behaviors because
Who Civilized You?