Cybele's art grew out of her flair for humor, public promotion and unique fashion sense, which, in her varied earlier careers, inspired cults of personality to grow around her.

Now exploiting long-dormant talents in drawing, painting, sculpture and composition, she describes her specifically representational work as "Surly Realism"... a play on words that is characteristically Cybele. Her ability to plumb and tease unexpected meaning from nearly everything she sees and experiences is manifest in both her two-dimensional and assemblage/sculptural pieces.

Indeed, much of Cybele's artwork is infested with her sardonic wit and her penchant for double-entendre and visual punning, yet no less with her acute perceptivity and skill in handling a remarkable array of media and styles.

In a similar way, her artwork explores emotional turmoil through the use of paradoxical imagery and visual wordplay. Many of Cybele's pieces are works of "Conceptual Symbolism" in the sense that they embody ideas-- often painful ones-- and express them through combinations of both abstract and representational imagery, ambiguous symbols and prosaic texts which are, in every instance, twisted, mutilated or decontextualized in such a way that they must be subjected to perverse reinterpretation.

To this end, Cybele often plays with the edges of images and artistic media in a manner which emphasizes the fracturing of symbolic, pictorial and material realities; the sharp edge of a denomination of paper currency will be found crossing a pebbly surface of handcrafted paper, while a frustrated artist's figure drawing is cut-out like a paper doll on one side and torn in anger on the other, and the whole draped with a velvet sash.