Blood of Life — Artist Q&A
Why the title Blood of Life?
The title reclaims blood as generative rather than shameful or violent. The work approaches blood through fertility, creativity, erotic embodiment, grief, and survival, while also confronting the realities of war and reproductive politics.
Why use your own blood as a medium?
Because the work refuses separation between bodily matter and meaning. The blood is not symbolic stand-in; it is part of the lived event itself. Contemporary culture often demands that reproductive experience be translated into sanitized or medically acceptable language before it can enter public visibility. These prints resist that demand.
The material itself carries vulnerability, memory, erotic force, grief, and transformation simultaneously. Using the blood directly also became a way of honoring the conditions that allowed the experience to become life-giving and creatively generative for me: housing, intimacy, companionship, my animals, rest, nourishment, privacy, time, artistic space, and relative bodily autonomy.
The subtitle names Lyric Rumor Rieke as “a being not yet prepared to dwell among the living.” Why that phrasing?
I wanted language that resisted clinical or accusatory terminology while still acknowledging presence, relation, and loss. The phrase reflects my understanding of becoming, embodiment, and earthly life.
The work connects reproductive experience with war and exile. How did those ideas become intertwined for you?
During the experience, I became consumed by thoughts of displacement and forced migration — especially in places like Gaza Strip, Sudan, Ukraine, Syria, and Myanmar. I kept imagining the sheer number of people enduring pregnancy and pregnancy ending while moving through camps, border crossings, shelters, overcrowded apartments, ruins, and temporary clinics.
There was something devastating to me about watching financial markets continue booming while bodies moved in masses across borders. Pregnancy does not pause for geopolitical catastrophe. Neither does pregnancy ending.
What changed me most was realizing that the sacred and creative dimensions of my own experience were inseparable from forms of safety unequally distributed throughout the world. The work emerged partly from confronting how war, exile, and displacement can warp the conditions under which a person is able to experience bodily transformation with dignity, privacy, care, and meaning.
How does living in Florida shape the piece?
The work was created during a period of increasing reproductive restriction and political surveillance. That atmosphere shaped both the emotional and material conditions of the project.
What do you hope viewers confront when encountering the work?
Their conditioning around purity, disgust, femininity, and which bodily realities are permitted public visibility. The work asks viewers to remain present with forms of blood and embodiment that society often demands be hidden, sanitized, or denied meaning.