Reflecting on my blog, I realise that I portray myself as very angry about Patriarchal societies and their treatment of women.
This is fair enough, I think, as women can often get a short straw in life and western societies are still patriarchal.
Am I doing the right thing with my anger however?
Am I keeping my audience?
I admire Louise Bourgeois and how she dealt with her anger in a subtle and subversive way. Her seminal piece, Destruction of the Father, goes a long way to express anger at Patriarchal families and societies – and she certainly knew about them from her own experience in France. She lived most of her life in America and I wonder what she thought of FGM – which is now practiced increasingly often, despite being illegal, among immigrant populations there? I wonder how she would have addressed herself? Was she proud of France for its determination to stamp it out?
The more I read about it, ( regularly in the newspapers these days), the more important it seems to me to make FGM the subject of my degree show. I am working on my 90 bleeding flowers – I have 60 so far. The piece will be big to reflect the enormity of the problem and the importance of erradicating the practice.
Do Not Cut the Flowers is a negative imperative . I do not want there to be any doubt about my abhorrence of the practice. Yet I hope it is subtle enough to be Fine Art and not a didactic rant.
Some people may not know what I am referring to. But then they may not know what FGM is anyway, nor read newspapers. Others I hope will make the connection and shudder. I hope if they carry any authority in any fields where FGM may occur, teachers for example, they remain aware and informed.
Along with my 90 bleeding flowers piece, I have done a very quick video and posted it onto Youtube. In this, I perform a similar FGM operation on a purse – which looks like a young girl’s labia.
I don’t mention FGM, the dialogue is supposed to be an ironic parrallel, but I have tagged it under FGM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRXXFoLbs-0
In another video, I take a scalpel to one of my representative flower prints.This suggests how in Egypt parents think they are being civilised and responsible by going to hospital to have the barbaric practice performed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRUvPFjX-4U
FGM has been illegal in Egypt since 2008, but doctors perform it in private . A young girl died recently in hospital and both her father and the doctor are being prosecuted. This will be the first prosecution. The father was quoted as saying he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known his daughter would die.
Does he think this statement makes him sound like a liberal, caring father?
Today, while printing some of the flowers, I did an experiment, printing onto tissue paper. This has a skin, flesh like effect. I placed the dripping, fragile flower onto a larger piece of Somerset paper to give it some substance . It proceeded to bleed into it. I thought this apt.
A second attempt saw the tissue paper tearing, so I placed it carefully to dry with some paper towel.
Again, I thought the finished piece was pertinent – with the paper towel soaking up the leaking ink.The original piece of tissue is not longer whole; it is ripped and torn.
