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Rising Stars: Meet Jessica Christine Magdaleno

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jessica Christine Magdaleno.

Hi Jessica Christine, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born in California but raised in Spokane, Washington. Growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money, so my mother moved us around. I reshaped that experience and I grew a love for travel. My head was always in a book, and I discovered herbalism at a very early age in an academic library my mother was studying at. Eventually, I moved out and started traveling on my own, and I wound up in the Middle East, working for VICE magazine. I was able to travel a lot from there and it was an eye-opening experience about womanhood. I remained there and started working for a Belgian company which allotted me a lot of corporate knowledge and I had some brilliant mentors. I went with the company to Belgium and decided to go to a school focusing on Fine Art photography, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. This helped me create my vision and later on in life as a Creative Director. In a way, I’ve done a lot of my life backward.

I created DeerWomen as a place of online permanence and a way to store and create all of the knowledge I was collecting from my mother’s passed-down books, travel, and women around the globe. Eventually, I bought my dream home, a neo-Victorian house in the mountains of California. After Covid hit, I decided to raise my daughter between Belgium and California, sticking with the theme of metamorphosis.

Apart from my involvement with DeerWomen, I am an artist and a mother. Who draws motivation from the patterns and transformations that occur in Nature. Nature is a constant. I include folklore and natural occurrences in my artistic creations, often collaborating with inspiring people who integrate this effascinating feeling to life in my videos and elixirs. The aspect of these transitional regions that fascinates me the most is the sensation of being on the cusp of something. This feral state gives rise to potentialities without any predetermined results, granting us the chance to rediscover our primal wildness in a society that is excessively overwhelming. I find myself these days in the city, creating connections and remembrance before society drowns out the wild.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
A smaller struggle is with social media. Social media has never really interested me, but in traveling so much, it is necessary to keep contact and a tool to show aspects of what you bring to an audience. Such platforms can be used as alchemy and must come to terms with the knowledge it bestows. When I use my accounts, it’s to reach out and really have something to say or show. It’s more well thought out these days and adds some beauty to cyberspace rather than another tutorial or personal CV.

I think I’m very fortunate that everything has gone so smoothly through all of these challenges. I have some good people around me and keep a small circle. Still, I never stop learning through the journey. Contentment is stagnation. With the latest collection and inspiration that hit me, I did a lot of learning as an international team and as a brand overseas. Now I feel I am more comfortable with how people work and able to pace and provide with them. Everything feels cohesive now yet I am constantly in flux.

So the biggest struggle? Getting my models to agree to my crazy ideas, in a day and dance in a mossy lake or find open-minded people. It was a team effort and translated beyond just languages and country mannerisms. The director’s infectious positivity, my friends lending their hairless cats, and the entire team were a dream come true.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I love to create worlds for the wild archetypes through visuals and nature-based creations. Everything I put out, is about harnessing the power of feminine beauty. Confidence and empowerment, I want women to feel their strength from the natural world. To be an otherworldly example of the mystery of sexuality in today’s modern society and discover their wildness apart from the thin layer of botox and masks. Beauty has been monetized and simplified and I want to bring back other forms, such as intuition, plants, and fauna.

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion,” said Francis Bacon. I had that tattooed on my ribcage by my cousin because it remains true for me in all that I do. My videos, my teas, my travels, and my parenting are all a bit strange and it adds the beauty to the mundane.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
There is a lot of easy access nowadays to information, to anti-aging and to superfoods, etc. It’s a rush of dopamine and stimuli to a very depressed culture. The sense of discovery is missing. The mystery and initiation into a sense of self and purpose. I think people are finding it harder to appreciate themselves in the midst of Artificial Intelligence, woke culture, and pandemics. The question always comes back to authenticity or evolution…

Very lush, beautiful places and people still remain out there and are creating the best experiences. We are in a new revolution. The art collective finds like-minded, strange alienated people who will always find each other and will bond more. We are on the brink of using new technology and speedier processing to upgrade our lives or destroy them. It feels as if people are using tech to get back to tribal roots, maybe unconsciously and the industry really shows this right now. In the end, it should always be open to interpretation.

I see my child with other children and learn a lot about the future from her. Not taking everything so seriously takes the pressure off. There’s no feeling of having to be perfect and that in itself is where beauty stems from. The strange imperfections, the crooked smiles, the weird and tangled.

I hope in ten years, we will see some wild-haired creatures walking down the street chewing miswak sticks and reading a book simultaneously. I hope we know we are going back to the wild.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Visuals By Scorpion, Elien Jansen, Louis Rakovich

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