Magda Boreysza
Mother Night
Sitting at a café table beside a busy thoroughfare in New Orleans’s St. Roch neighborhood, latte in hand, I wondered how I would know which of the other customers was the woman I was supposed to be meeting. I’d searched for the artist’s image online but—although I found beaucoup samples of her work—the only photo of her was in costume with her face all but obscured. I made awkward eye contact with several women. Each smiled and walked on.
Then, suddenly there she was. I knew her by her shirt—fey silk, saffron gold, with Bengal tigers collar to hem, worn with such quiet confidence. I had no doubt this was the woman who’d drawn the foxes, opossums, wolves, crows, luna moths, owls, and bobcats on “The Calendar of the Full Moon” that had enchanted me since I received it for Christmas.
I set my phone to record and, as trucks rumbled past, horns honked, and the sorority girls at the next table laughed, I wondered if I’d be able to hear Magda Boreysza’s soft voice, let alone capture it in my recording. I pride myself on identifying accents. But as she began to speak, I found hers to be a challenge. And no wonder. Although Boreysza was born in Poland to Polish parents, she spent her early twenties in Scotland, and by her early thirties had landed in New Orleans.
Her art practice has taken nearly as circuitous a journey. She’d received her undergraduate and master’s in fine art from Edinburgh College of Art, where she’d tried her hand at animation, printmaking, painting, ceramics, mask making, and embroidery, and finally settled on the thing she’d loved since childhood—simply drawing. “I like to tell stories in my artwork and I knew I could do that through illustration,” she said. “I’ve always struggled with words. They’re not my medium.”
But through her artwork, which she creates under the name Fox & Comet, Boreysza is adept at crafting complex stories of transformation. Her forest creatures scamper. They whisper. They hide. They emerge. They tremble. They comfort. They connect. And above all, they transform.
“I spent a lot of time outdoors growing up,” Boreysza said. “In Poland, we lived on the edge of the forest and I walked there every day with the dogs.”
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Magda Boreysza.
Moth Queen
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Magda Boreysza
Huntress
The natural creatures she encountered, or imagined, there play prominent roles in her work today, which always returns to the connecting theme of transformation. “Transformation is something you can read in various ways,” she said. “It can be personal transformation, becoming who you want to be. It can be spiritual or metaphysical transformation, what happens to us when we die or when we’re born. The world is in constant flux and transformation, and we’re transforming with it.”
There are recurring characters in Boreysza’s work. There’s a feral girl child interacting with sage animals, usually in the forest at night. There are often foxes, which speak to Boreysza because they’re not creatures of the day or the night but of the hours in between. Her work is a celebration of that “in between” where day meets night, where reality meets fantasy, where waking hours meet dreamscape.
The artist herself doesn’t spend much time interpreting the things she draws. “I’m often surprised by the things people see in my drawings,” she said. “They might read images like women changing into animals as someone becoming powerful, harnessing their inner power, or maturing and growing into the adult they will become. I don’t really think beforehand what I’m going to draw. It just sort of comes to me. I draw what I draw because it feels right. If it resonates with me, I’ll draw it. But I love to hear others’ interpretations.”
From her first visit to New Orleans, Boreysza says she knew it was a good fit for her. “I first visited the Marigny and it immediately felt like home,” she said. “I met such lovely and interesting people, a lot of artists and musicians. The city has space for creativity. I felt like I was able to grow as an artist here and actually make a living doing my art.”
Magda Boreysza
The Childrens Crusade
If that wasn’t gift enough, the city also offered Boreysza Carnival. Through New Orleans’s Mardi Gras traditions, she’s been able to bring her beloved creatures to life, to recreate them in 3-D, inhabit them, and walk around inside them. “I get to transform myself,” she said. “I get to bring my ideas into reality. I get to embody my characters and experience life as they do.”
Boreysza works on her costumes all year and, to her, they’re never truly finished. “I get to a point where I think they’re ready to wear, but my intention is to keep working on them forever,” she said. So, come Carnival 2027, if you encounter a fanciful fox or a whimsical opossum on a New Orleans street, know you may be coming face to face with a creature in transformation.
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See more of Boreysza’s work at foxandcomet.com.
