Melissa Finn is a researcher, writer, spoken word poet, recording artist, visual artist, and arts activist. She creates acrylic art and is currently developing two main art series, an orchid series and a question series. Her orchid art celebrates the beauty and diversity of women’s bodies since the orchid is the flower of the clitoris and accurately symbolizes the vulva. Her work is a rebellion against the paradoxical and incommensurable tendencies in society to objectify and commodify the clitoris, vulva, and vagina and also to denigrate them. Her question series seeks to make the question mark one that is gentle and calming, and inescapable in its allure and re-plete with symbolic value. Like a blue meandering river set against a nature backdrop flowing into a lagoon or the intricate body of a curious dragon in pursuit of an island it has yet to ex-plore, the question mark wants to end with a singular hovering full stop, or dot. About this dot, Melissa is inspired by ‘the saloon’ or pause in Arabic. There are no definitive answers to any question, the dot is held in perpetual abeyance, and yet we are nonetheless inclined to keep asking questions, to keep being exploratory and curious because doing so invokes our humanity and gives our life meaning. Her artwork and her upcoming album supporting #endFGM (female genital mutilation) advocacy with FGM survivor and educator Maryan Deeqa and funded by the Ontario Arts Council in Canada are forms of art activism against one of the most horrific and widespread human rights abuses on the planet, affecting more than 200 million women and girls alive today. Melissa’s art can now be worn as orchid couture through made-to-order designs created by Le Galeriste in Montreal.