Blood of Life

Please note that this exhibit was painted with deeply personal material which some may consider sensitive

2023 prints made from the my blood after 56 days of pregnancy with Lyric Rumor Rieke, a being not yet prepared to dwell among the living.

With this work, I employ a deeply sensitive and personal medium as both hymn and indictment: a song lifting up my creative body, and a language through which to speak my rage around three conditions of blood:

1) The blood of violence shed needlessly and without end. Blood from war stands as the antithesis of my 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) My own existence as a menstruating citizen of Florida, where reproductive healthcare following miscarriage has become politically endangered, surveilled, and vulnerable to criminalization.

My 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?