Blood of Life
2023 prints made from the artist’s blood after 56 days of pregnancy with Lyric Rumor Rieke, a being not yet prepared to dwell among the living.
With this work, the artist employs a deeply sensitive and personal medium as both hymn and indictment: a song lifting up her creative body, and a language through which to speak her rage around three conditions of blood.
1) The blood of violence shed needlessly and without end. Blood from war stands as the antithesis of her own associations with bleeding: wombhood, creative force, lunar rhythm, tides, erotic divinity.
2) The blood of the displaced and exiled, forced to endure miscarriage amid conditions of profound bodily, spiritual, and emotional rupture, without privacy, safety, shelter, or care.
3) Her own existence as a menstruating citizen of Florida, where reproductive healthcare following miscarriage has become politically endangered, surveilled, and vulnerable to criminalization.
The Blood of Life collection asks the viewer to resist reflexive disgust and to confront their conditioning around purity, contamination, femininity, and which forms of blood society permits to enter public view. It asks: When will the bloodshed of global violence end? When will the bloodshed of exile end? When will the United States restore reproductive rights and bodily autonomy?
Dancing Cow
Frolicking Bull w/ Flies in a Meadow
Determined Calf
Brain Stem
Fluffy-Tailed Squirrel
Polycreature Balanced on a Beach Ball
Not the blood of war
Not the blood of transphobia
Not the blood of domination
Not the blood of indigenous woman-stealing
Not the blood of data centers
Not the blood of surveillance