Karen Hanrahan

I Didn’t Tell
collage
11 x 14 in.

This collage was created when I was 56 years old. It was the first collage where my subconscious revealed itself around the topic of rape. I was creating with a group of women, and to shift things up a bit we were prompted to pass our image sources to our neighbor and collage with those materials instead of our own. My neighbor was a survivor. I was gang raped at the age of 17. I never told anyone. My rape is a topic I had the least voice about. At 50 I was flooded with memories of my rape. Everyone else seemed to know that I was a survivor but me. I took 6 years for rape to find its way into a piece of collage work. I see in this piece: shame, youth, a suggestion of force and male anatomy, a place to hide. Sprocket holes frame a series of rape moments in time.

© Karen Hanrahan