Justine Witkowski (she/they) is a transdisciplinary writer and artist based out of the southwestern United States. Born and raised in the Sonora, she has always had an interest in the desert and its unique mechanisms of life, death and rebirth, which has most prominently manifested in her artistic practice, beginning as the topic for her AP Studio project that spanned from August 2020-April 2021. Not long afterward, Justine began a double major in studio art and anthropology at the University of New Mexico in August 2021, during which her interests in mythology and ecology converged, leading the creation of a fictious scape called the "Floodplain". The Floodplain is a centuries-old desertscape consisting of both written and environmental histories meant to mimic our own, inspired by the ruthless passages of life and death in the desert and how life continues to thrive within it nonetheless. The ambition behind the ongoing project has varied over time, although at its heart, it is meant to explore otherworldly processes through worldly lenses of pattern recognition and the building of a consistent visual lexicon. The Floodplain has since been rendered through drawing, lithography, intaglio, watercolor, sculpture and performance art. It is currently being used to explore the relationship between machinery, mathematics and divinity.
Justine's written practice is broader and extends beyond the Floodplain in its scope, although much of its core, such as life/death cycles and the importance of place continue to find their way in. In addition to life, death and rebirth, Justine has currently been working on exploring limbo in her written work, with themes of transience, listlessness and stagnancy being central to her work. Her longer works in progress include "VOZENILEK", "Brand New Stigmata" and "Forsythia" with excerpts from the last two being available in Cream Scene Carnival's Wild West Issue and Querencia Press' Summer 2024 Anthology, respectively. Additionally, she is working on "Lusitania: A Double Feature", consisting of a collection of connected flash/short fiction, some which have also made appearances in Vial of Bones and Conceptions Southwest magazines.
