Velvet Ear

Brittany A. Forrest

Jul 2024 · Brittany Forrest

About this ebook

Velvet Ear is a, autobiographically inspired, psychological science fiction telling the story of Landry Knox and Gretchen Grim falling in love and moving into a basement apartment. Mr. Knox, Landry's father, lives upstairs. The unit has a curtain instead of a front door. The narrative emerges out of tensions between two floors. With a traumatic history of being estranged, Gretchen finds comfort in building a daughterly bond with Mr. Knox. After a dark miscarriage, Landry and Gretchen psychologically decline which results in a second pregnancy. Landry is eager to be a father, while Gretchen is apprehensive and disconnected. Sounds of moaning, high heels, and the smacking of bare feet running away materialize from upstairs which ignites time. Mr. Knox begins to invade Landry and Gretchen sexually, psychologically, and physically. His voyeuristic tendencies begin to play with the hallucinations of Landry as a young boy. A gaslighting element stands out when Mr. Knox denies his behavior, bringing doubt and strain to Landry and Gretchen's relationship -- which leads to blaming one another. The question of whether this is happening or not becomes answered when they purchase a camera but remains unknown to the reader.

Routine-oriented and lonely, Mr. Knox reacts maladaptively toward the changes from the divorce with Landry's mother. Mr. Knox renovated the house to look like the home Landry grew up in and he starts drinking heavily. Mr. Knox has a secret alter ego that cross-dressed and performed maternal tasks, a suggested result of trauma connected to his mother and sibling. This veil of secrecy becomes more opaque as the story unfolds, but also becomes more ambiguous to heighten the fear of uncertainty. Questions emerge regarding the validity of intention, resulting in a moral dilemma for the reader. The book ends by requesting the reader to go back to the beginning. This connects back to the opening epigraph written by Albert Camus, "A man defines himself by his make-believe as well as his sincere impulses."

About the author

Brittany/Andrew Forrest (she/her or he/him) is a queer Ontario-based surrealist artist and author. She focuses on character development through drawing, sculpting, mold-making, and wording that stretches away from traditional approaches to represent the tale of her estranged identity. Her study of the body began as a young child through performing arts. Rigorous observational skills transitioned into a thriving art and writing practice penetrating all facets of the being. Forrest now focuses on dissecting human exchange and perception to find correlations within the interplay between bodies by accessing memories, dreams, the imagination, and layers of consciousness. The material selection employs various studies that engage in theoretics linked to her practice that anatomizes the intricacies of psychological defense mechanisms. She does this by researching the functions, associations, and interactions between materials – essentially psychoanalyzing the medium – to propose the body as animate and inanimate.

Forrest graduated with honors from McMaster University, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts, minoring in Art History. There, she was awarded four academic scholarships, voted class choice, and earned the faculty award. During her subsequent Master of Fine Arts candidacy at Western University, she was accorded the Graduate Thesis Research Award and Graduate Travel and Research Grant. She will continue her graduate research at Western in the PhD Art and Visual Culture program beginning in the Fall, 2024. Her work was recently selected for the International Art Fair Mixing Identities (London, UK and Rome, IT), the New Realism/Altered Reality exhibition (New York City, NY), and was published in the ARTSIN SQUARE magazine. Forrest published her first autobiographical book, The Imaginary Imagination; a science fiction short story, Chair, in the art collective book titled Dystopia: A Visual Anthology; and curated her solo exhibition, gasp, at Satellite Project Space (London, ON) in 2023. A prolific author, Forrest also completed short story The Room, and books Dream Space and Velvet Ear in 2024. Lullaby is her MFA thesis exhibition.