Taino Mother & Artist
Kizzie Suriel is a contemporary Taíno artist whose work flows like ceremony—each piece a radiant homage to Indigenous beauty, spiritual resilience, and ancestral presence. Drawing from her Caribbean Taíno heritage, Kizzie blends bold floral compositions with luminous gold-embossed alcohol inks, creating fine art prints that feel both ethereal and grounded.
Kizzie’s art is more than décor—it’s medicine. Her use of organic and abstract forms evokes the rhythms of the earth, inviting viewers into a space of reflection, remembrance, and reverence. Every stroke is a reclamation of Indigenous femininity, honoring the land, the waters, and the spirit of the ancestors.
As a featured artist with Livity Tree Art, Kizzie’s work carries forward a mission of cultural preservation and environmental stewardship. Her creations serve as vibrant portals—bridging ancient wisdom with contemporary expression, and calling us all back to what is sacred.
Aboriginal Spirals | Livity Tree Art
✨ Movement is prayer. Color is memory.
Taíno artist and mother Kizzie Suriel dances with the ancestors, carrying their wisdom into every step and every brushstroke. Her piece, Spiral Colors, honors the sacred spiral of Taíno cosmology—the flow of life, energy, and spirit. Embracing indigenous art isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s a journey of reconnecting with the roots of our cultural history.
Spirals of Ancestral Knowing
The spiral turns inward and outward simultaneously—it is the shape of growth and return, of expansion and centering, of the journey that always leads back to source. "Aboriginal Spirals" draws connection between two indigenous traditions separated by the Pacific Ocean yet unified in their recognition of this primordial symbol: the Taíno peoples of the Caribbean and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, both of whom carved and painted spirals as sacred knowledge, as map and memory, as connection to the Dreaming.
In Taíno cosmology, spirals adorned the walls of caves that served as ceremonial spaces, places of burial, portals to the underworld realm of Coaybay where ancestors dwelled. The spiral represented the hurricane—that devastating spiral storm that defines Caribbean weather patterns, feared and respected as manifestation of divine power. It represented the navel, the umbilical connection to ancestry. It marked the journey of the soul, spiraling through death into rebirth. The Taíno carved these spirals alongside representations of cemíes—the spiritual beings who animated all of nature—understanding that the spiral was itself a language, a way of marking cosmic truth onto stone so it would endure beyond individual lifetimes.
Australian Aboriginal cultures, containing the world's oldest continuous artistic tradition spanning more than 60,000 years, painted spirals across rock faces from Kakadu to the Kimberleys, from desert ochre paintings to coastal engravings. In Aboriginal cosmology, spirals are djang (Dreaming) sites—they mark waterholes, camping places, the paths traveled by ancestral beings during the Dreamtime when the world was sung into being. Each spiral is both literal map (showing where resources exist) and spiritual diagram (showing how to navigate sacred landscape). The spiral represents the journey—physical, spiritual, temporal—and the understanding that all journeys are circular, that we are always walking the paths our ancestors walked, adding our footprints to theirs.
What connects Taíno and Aboriginal spiral traditions is indigenous epistemology—the understanding that knowledge is cyclical, experiential, and encoded in symbol and story. Both cultures recognized that the spiral appears everywhere in nature: in shells and galaxies, in fingerprints and weather patterns, in the unfurling fern and the coiled serpent. By marking spirals on stone, they were documenting cosmic law, asserting: we see the patterns, we understand the design, we are literate in the language of creation itself. "Aboriginal Spirals" honors this parallel wisdom, recognizing that indigenous peoples worldwide arrived at similar truths because they observed the same universe with unclouded eyes, then marked what they saw so future generations would remember: the spiral is the shape of time, of life, of the cosmos—and we knew this first, carved it deepest, painted it to last forever.
These vibrant expressions tell stories, preserving invaluable heritage while promoting eco-friendly practices.
By supporting indigenous artists, we’re not just acquiring beautiful pieces but also investing in the continuation of these rich traditions.
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Majestic Elephant | Livity Tree Art
The Elephant Between Worlds
In Caribbean and indigenous contexts, where African and Asian indentured peoples brought their traditions to mix with Aboriginal knowledge, the elephant can represent diasporic memory—the ability to remember across oceans, to carry ancestral wisdom through displacement, to never forget where you come from even when forced far from home. Elephants are known for their extraordinary memory, their matriarchal societies where elder females lead with wisdom earned through decades. They mourn their dead. They return to the bones of their ancestors. They recognize family across time.
This majestic elephant, painted in the vulnerable tenderness of pink and the spiritual depth of blue, becomes a meditation on sacred memory, on the divine feminine and masculine united, on strength that doesn't require aggression, on wisdom that holds both power and compassion. It is Ganesha opening paths, Maya's prophetic dream made manifest, the matriarch who remembers everything, rendered in colors that refuse to be constrained by expectation—majestic, liminal, whole.
✨ A meditation in motion, this piece invites the viewer to honor the balance of fluidity and strength within themselves.
The Queen of Flowers
Bleeding Beauty—The Rose in Liquid Form
Queen of Flowers emerges through alcohol ink, that rebellious medium where pigment and alcohol create their own chemistry, their own rules. Unlike watercolor's gentle washes or acrylic's controllable opacity, alcohol ink is volatile—it blooms, bleeds, and moves with a mind of its own. The artist can guide but never fully dominate. Colors spread in organic bursts, creating cells and gradients that mirror natural patterns: the way water moves, the way bruises form, the way flower petals hold light and shadow in their velvet folds.
The rose holds more symbolic weight than perhaps any other flower. She is Aphrodite's flower, born from the sea foam mixed with Adonis's blood. She is the Islamic symbol of the soul's unfolding toward divine truth, her spiraling petals representing the mystic's journey inward. She adorns the Virgin Mary and grows in paradise. She marked political allegiances in England's Wars of the Roses. She blooms in Frida Kahlo's self-portraits and Rumi's poetry. She represents love, secrecy (sub rosa), beauty, passion, sacrifice, England, socialism, romance—she is the flower upon whom humans have projected everything, until her image risks becoming emptied of meaning, a cliché, a Valentine's Day commodity.
✨ The Queen of Flowers is an invitation to rise each day with grace, to honor love as a guiding force, and to see beauty in the cycles of becoming.
Taino Golden Swirls
Ancient Marks in Liquid Light
The Taíno spiral emerges in alcohol ink—that fluid, unpredictable medium that bleeds and blooms according to its own logic—rendered in pink that shifts from blush to magenta to coral, colors that evoke flesh, sunrise, the inside of conch shells pulled from Caribbean waters. Over this liquid foundation, gold embossing rises in relief, catching light, transforming the ancient petroglyphs carved in limestone caves into something tactile and precious, insisting on their value in the literal language of gold.
For the Taíno and Arawak peoples of the Caribbean, the spiral was fundamental sacred geometry. Carved into cave walls throughout Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Bahamas, these spirals represented the juracán (hurricane)—that devastating rotating storm system whose Taíno name we still speak when we say "hurricane." The spiral marked cyclical time, the soul's journey through birth, death, and rebirth, the path between the earthly realm and Coaybay, the land of ancestors. Spirals adorned caves that served as ceremonial centers, burial sites, and portals where behiques (shamans) could journey between worlds using cohoba, the sacred hallucinogenic snuff that allowed spirit travel.
Pink—unexpected, tender, vulnerable—brings these ancient symbols into the realm of the body, the heart, the flesh that was violated during colonization but never fully destroyed. Pink is blood diluted in water, is the color inside the mouth that speaks language nearly erased, is dawn promising another day of survival. The alcohol ink's characteristic bleeding and flowing honors how Taíno culture spread, mixed, survived—not in pure isolated form but bleeding into African traditions, into Spanish language, into the mixed-race Caribbean peoples who carry indigenous DNA even when records claim their ancestors were "extinct."
Gold embossing elevates these spirals from cave walls into the realm of the precious, the valuable, the worth-protecting. Gold—what the Spanish sought, what they murdered for, what they believed justified genocide—here serves indigenous symbols, outlining spirals that existed before European greed, that will outlast colonial amnesia. The embossing creates dimension, makes the spirals rise from the surface, demands you acknowledge their presence through touch and sight. These are not relics, not artifacts safely dead in museums. These are living symbols, still turning, rendered in pink that bleeds like survival and gold that insists: this knowledge was always precious, always valuable, always worth more than what you came here seeking.