I’m making a little art book! It’s my first one and probably NO ONE will buy it, but I think that’s okay. I just want to work towards a goal. It’s going to be about feral children. I can’t decide if I want to call it “Raised By” or “The Feral Kids” Neither of those are that exciting I guess…
I’ve had this fascination with the stories of feral children. They are usually such terribly sad stories of neglect, abandonment and abuse. It is also an incredibly powerful statement on nurture vs. nature, that our humanity relies so heavily on the care of others. When children don’t learn language or meet certain developmental milestones in life they unfortunately aren’t able to recover those skills. They will forever have trouble communicating and in most instances not able to learn more than a few words of a language. Most notably a Russian girl named Oxana Malaya was raised by dogs and is the most studied feral child that I can think of, but there are others. Even recently a little girl in Florida named Danielle is behaviorally labeled as a feral child. She was found in an abandoned home at 6 years old by police and later adopted by a family that have given her a lot of love and support that she will need for the rest of her life. Like other feral children Danielle is extremely developmentally challenged, cannot speak more than a few words of english and cannot feed or dress herself with any degree of competency. The story is especially sad because she did not live alone in the home she was found in. Her mother and brother lived in the house with her, but she was neglected so thoroughly that she never learned language in addition to any other developmental milestone. You can read more about her story here. Grab a tissue.
I don’t want the book to be sad though. I would prefer for it to strike a chord with people that think their kids are wild animals in an endearing sort of way. We all (people) have such different personalities! Some of us are shy and standoffish like cats, some are focused on food like squirrels and some are gregarious and friendly like dogs. I’d like to create art that exhibits those behaviors in a “raised by” series.
I hope you like this one! More to follow, tomorrow is raised by squirrels!
xoxo
-Tracey
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