A Cat, a Mic, and a Spotlight

Loveday Funck
Sep 21, 2025
3 min read

Blue Whisper Kitty

Buy Now

As a digital collage artist, I build my worlds from fragments, bits of light, scraps of memory, animals that never quite belonged in this century. My work often carries the surreal weight of fairy tales and haunted mirrors, layered with antique textures and a whisper of New Orleans shadow.

But every artist, no matter how deep their signature style, needs space to wander. To play. To try something that doesn’t quite fit.

That’s what I love about the Paris Collage Collective weekly challenge. It invites me to step outside the rhythms I know, not to abandon them, but to remember where they began. Each prompt is a mirror, a nudge, a return to the roots of curiosity.

This week, the result was a soft departure from my usual style. A pale kitten, eyes wide, almost uncertain, holds a single blue flower in a dreamscape of blossoms. It’s gentler than my typical work, almost shy. But cats are part of my visual language, always. This time, though, I let the cat be quiet. I let the flower take up space.

It’s easy to get swept up in aesthetics or the pressure of cohesive branding. But experiments like this remind me: collage, at its heart, is about listening. Not controlling. Not mastering. But listening: to color, to emotion, to what happens when you step just one inch beyond your known edge.

There are stories that ask to be seen. Others ask to be heard.

Since its beginning, Tongue of the Serpent has lived at the crossroads, not just in its content, but in its form. It’s part Southern Gothic, part whispered myth, part haunted object cabinet. It’s grown into video, live performance, reels, and immersive narrative.

But even as the world moved visually, I kept hearing the stories in my head the way they started: as voice and breath, shadow and rhythm.

This Tuesday at 11 a.m., Tongue of the Serpent becomes a podcast.

The first three episodes, reshaped slightly for audio, will premiere on YouTube Podcasts, inviting you to close your eyes and step into the Krewe of the Morningstar through sound alone.

These are not just episodes. They are spells stitched with silence.

They are meant to be carried, through car rides, dishwashing sessions, late-night walks, like old stories once passed from mouth to ear, heart to hand.

If you’ve ever felt haunted by one of our tales… now you can bring that haunting with you.

If podcasting is the art of the well-shaped whisper, then improv is the opposite. It’s thunder in a teacup. It’s risk in real time.

This Friday night, I’ll be on stage for two back-to-back improv shows. No scripts. No retakes. Just breath, instinct, and the wild trust that something will arrive if we make enough space for it.

It’s a very different kind of storytelling than Tongue of the Serpent, but the heart is the same:

Let the story reveal itself.

Follow what feels true.

And leave a little room for chaos.

Improv reminds me that not everything needs to be polished to matter. Some of the most honest moments I’ve ever shared with an audience have come from scenes that began in complete uncertainty.

If you’re local, come be part of the experiment. We’ll laugh, we’ll fumble, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll find something beautiful hidden in the mess.