I have finished printing my 90 flowers!
Some of these I printed onto wet Somerset paper and some onto dry. Where the paper was dry I also splattered water so it made the silkscreen inks bleed and this effect was transfered to the paper below when I squeegied the inks through.
I have a considerable variety now of flowers. Some are bleeding , some are mutilated, some have been sewn up too.
After I had finished, and armed with all my dry prints, I went up to the Studios and laid them down in the biggest space I could find. I asked people for feed back. I mentioned that I was thinking of sewing the prints together and hanging them on a wall, but people thought they looked good on the floor! This was an interesting idea.
If I put them on the floor, I would like to protect them so people can walk on them if they like.
This adds another dimension: The Down Trodden, the Repressed. Being walked over is another form of violation, both literally and metaphorically.
I cannot put glass over the prints – for obvious safety reasons – but I could put perspex! As there will be joins in the prints, it doesn’t matter if there are joins in the perspex/it is not all one piece.
I need to find out if the White Space is free – or if I can put them on the floor in the Studio.
What also came to mind was the last line from W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) poem, “He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven”
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
In a way this is relevant because with the mutiliation of a woman’s sexuality, a whole dimension of human experience is lost to her.
People walking over the perspex and prints are walking over a symbol of the murdered sexuality of young women. Often their very lives, their health and their power.
The poem by W.B.Yeats is very beautiful:
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
It is a love poem. Is it irrelevant?
Not really, as love and sexual passion go together and women are mutilated so they never experience passion, therefore their experience of love is also diminished.
Their dreams are dashed, they are walked over – they are disempowered.
In the space I do get, I could perhaps have the title on one wall:
Do Not Cut The Flowers
If people are walking over them, then on an opposite wall I would put:
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)
I have also writen to our Ipswich MP, Ben Gummer asking him what he is going to do so that FGM is not practiced in Ipswich. From past experience I know that MPs always reply on Common’s paper. I could frame his reply.
I could also do a print of the statistics of FGM in the various countries. Either as a silkscreen or as a reverse print transfer.
And a separate one for the UK , France and other European countries – or perhaps just keep it to European countries?
If it is against the law and happens here, it somehow makes it WORSE.
