Its easy to tell someone to run.
But its hard to actually… run when you are broken. I’ve always found horses interesting, the way they are utilized by human society, the way they are treated. When a horse is broken, it is put to sleep. When it can’t run it is killed. Sometimes humans cant run away, they cant cry for help, and because their abusers might kill them they instead opt to kill themselves. Its a cruel fate, and it is much more common than the media lets it out to be.
Once again I’m using orange; I love that colour. To me, it has no negatives, it is so rich and wonderful and bright. This creature I’ve made out of food and pillow stuffing is unable to run, just like the people who are suffering from abuse– plain, disjointed, but recognisable… I love animal imagery, because I feel like sometimes people forget that we are animals, too.
This is about how ‘invisible’ this subject can be to others… unless you tell someone sometimes, its impossible to actually see what is happening behind closed curtains. I got pictures of me and people who suffered abuse; my housemate and my mum, and in pictures where we clearly look fine I have marred our faces with a knife and blotted them with red ink. Not so invisible, now.
It is pinned to a corkboard because I have fond memories of having a corkboard at home with our pictures pinned to it of when we were little and I think that many can relate to that as well.
Children are far from exempt from the violence that adults are subject to.
This is in two parts; it is firstly a keyboard and secondly the child, and I’ll be talking about them both as a whole. The keyboard is an old keyboard of mine I smashed up with a hammer and embedded with glass for the sole reason of displaying pain; the idea of something that you have to press on to play coupled with the idea of cutting your fingers is a metaphor for how something you love can turn painful, just like a relationship.
The child is old childs clothing of mine stuffed with polyester and sat upright- its head is a flower in bloom, a symbol of innocence, but its lack of limbs and the way it sits with its hands away from the keyboard are almost like it has been scolded. I purposefully used female things to scatter around it as a nod to pedophillia and the way men lusting after younger and younger girls is getting more and more common.
These two pieces are very sentimental to me; perhaps they are not raw, but I put a lot of heart into making a ‘scene’ with this. It is edged by a pair of stained panties with the tag showing the age.
This is what I made that was inspired by Tracy Emin. An installation piece, scattered with various pain-pills, topped by a torn pillow with a heavily make-uped face jutting from it. I made sure to scatter make-up around too. This is about violence against women (not to say men also do not experience this violence, but rather, I wanted to target something I had personally been involved in) and I made sure I kept that consistent with all my other pieces. This is the centrepiece.
Theres something horrible about it that isn’t just in its grime-y nature… its the aftermath, its the time after rape and abuse and anything else that could be going on. Its the disgusting nature of the lives of women who are being sexually abused. I tried to make it as overtly crude as possible because I want people to stare and keep staring, look around, almost ‘explore’ the outskirts of the bed as if its a puzzle. The distance between the pillow and the foot of the covers makes you lean inwards a little… but not too much. You can never really be close to ‘her’ face.
I use a lot of blood in my work… but never bones. These are merely bleached chicken bones, and the blood is from chicken livers; but many people have gazed at it and felt a sense of fear (from the feedback I have amassed at least). Its very crude, very raw, and I think sometimes its important to be raw with work… just a pink background, jarred by these protruding bones, splattered with blood… it was fun to make.
Blood is an important part to my art work because it is the life-fluid, it is the thing that keeps us alive. But it is also the thing that is often spilled in domestic violence, be it by puncture, scratches or worse; sexual injury. I made sure to correlate the feathers in this with the bed piece I have made, which also uses feathers, which I find innocent, delicate, and horrid to see bent and broken and stained. I adore them.
