Blood

2000

These images pose an uneasy conflict between seeing the images as beautiful and as repulsive simulataneously. One viewer, looking at Cloth, at first smiled, then suddenly grimaced, saying, "Oh! I thought it was flower at first!" We can see image as beautiful -- if we don't realize what it represents, if we just look at it as color and form. But when we see what it "is", our human associations with blood and with the objects create a very different reaction. Which is it -- beautiful? or repulsive? an object with myriad human, emotional associations, or color and form?

There is also a sexual and feminist component to the images. Even the least explicit, Cloth, may be suggestive of vagina. The tampon of Blood #2, touches on all the associations we have with menstruation, "mess", "dirt", "problem" -- and at the same time, the beauty of a woman's fertility, the tremendous power of her ability to reproduce. Also, by the blood, suggesting a woman's pain, the pain (considerable for some women) of the monthly routine of her body, for the sake of her beautiful fertility. Pushing the sexual associations even further is the bloody panty of Blood #3. Menstruation, miscarriage, rape, violence -- all suggested by the image, all true of a woman's life. And at the same time, the image, in spite of the associations, some of them extremely disturbing, is wonderfully beautiful.

Our lives, human life, cannot be neatly categorized. We are horrific and beatific and the same time, beautiful and repulsive simultaneously.

The photographs in this series were taken by placing the objects on a high-resolution scanner. Each image is printed with archival inks on archival paper in a signed limited edition of 15.