BLOOD & BIRDS
2016 – 2017
blood / body / menstruation / ritual
This body of work explores the symbolic, material and cultural dimensions of blood, with a particular focus on menstruation as both a biological process and a site of meaning. I use menstrual blood alongside traditional artistic materials to bring a bodily substance historically associated with concealment and invisibility into the visible field of the work.
My interest in menstruation led me into a wider exploration of blood, the body, hunting and animality. Along the way, I encountered ideas connecting menstrual blood with hunting and with the blood of hunted animals. This became a productive point of departure: I began to think about the bleeding female body alongside the wounded animal, and about blood not only as bodily matter but also as a trace – something that can reveal, implicate, attract or be followed.
Birds entered the work through another set of associations, including the image of the bloodied glove in Hitchcock’s The Birds. From these overlapping threads emerged hunting scenes painted on sanitary pads, birds entering domestic spaces, bloodied objects and hybrid images.
The works move between the intimate and the ritual, the bodily and the cultural, violence and reproduction. Humour enters almost inevitably: the sanitary pad becomes a hunting ground, and its wings turn an object associated with containment into something that can take flight.
more works from BODY / HYBRIDS / MYTH: