During the life of a textile, the stain is often fatal for the item, especially if from the body. Corporeal fluids have elicited strong reactions of disgust and repulsion throughout many cultures, menstrual blood being the most consistently abject of those fluids. That belief has shaped how women are regarded in societies from pre-history to the present day, as women are continually taught to hide the process from others and to believe it to be dirty and shameful. By replicating the stains larger than life and in rich layers of thread, I want to entice the viewer to confront those mixed responses of attraction/repulsion as something lush and luxurious, yet unclean.
For Euphemenses, I opted to move away from the ease of recognizing the stains to mimic a more expressive, abstract style. The marks are lush and vivid, but the title reminds the viewer of what they are looking at…and the uncomfortable proximity of being this close to something this abject, yet beautiful.
- Bloody Mary
- Lining the Drawers
- Pad Straddling
- On the Blob
- Dropping Clots
- Having the Painters In
- Got the Thingies
- Red Special
- Tin Roof Rusted
- Kitty Has a Nosebleed
- The Misery
- Sitting on a Sock
- Wounded Clam
- Leak Week
- The Communists Are In the Funhouse