ARTIST STATEMENT
“From blood-injury to blood-paint”
Through an analysis of the phenomenon of the menstrual body flow, it is a question of reconsidering a fluid that has catalyzed fears and taboos as a creative process in what it possesses of more vast, strange and troubling. How this body, in permeable and failing loss, becomes, by the assembly of a plastic device, the powerful body of the work in “process”? Through an exhibited interiority, these secretions and humours, whose symbolism refers to an excluding phenomenon or favorable to the dispossession of oneself, is transformed. That is to say, a so-called “negative” flow, culturally devaluing and stigmatizing, a non-control of the body becomes the starting point of a new way of painting.
Menstrual blood as an overflowing abjection becomes an artistic overflow. Mood becoming work, individual body becoming social in an imperative of rehabilitation of a blood soiled by the domination towards an emancipating pictorial practice. In a tension between the reality of the body’s blood, symbol of injury, and the “blood-painting”, this research of an informal pictorial gesture allows a transformation, to make aesthetic what is commonly dirty. Between allegory and overcoming, through the transposition of blood in painting, it is a question of retranscribing an overflow: the non-control of a fluid which spreads. Between density and opacity, the blood mood becomes colored impressions whose absorption of the fabric allows the trace. A pictorial trace becomes a memory of the wounds of individual and collective past, in a transformation of what is commonly dirty into a pictorial work. I chose the textile paint for its fluidity and its possibility of absorption by the fabric, that allowed me to retranscribe the blood absorbed by the fabric or the sanitary napkin.
Moreover, the performative dimension allowed me to reach a fusion with the textile painting and the fabric bringing me towards a sensory dimension even organic with these two mediums. Once this symbolic fusion was achieved, I experimented with the question of developing a pictorial gesture that proceeds from a connection between the hand and the liberation of a blood-painting symbol of wounds and traumas. The superimposition of fabrics is always set up to evoke a family lineage or the collective unconscious. The color arrives by colored emotional impressions to go from the colors known as “cold” and for me “dead” towards “hot” colors and for me “alive”. The gestuality that I set up is that of a tension between non-control and control of a flow which spreads, fusion or not of colors, opacity and profusion.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
“As far back as I can remember, there is this sensation of being in a disembodied body which must find its envelope and my first approach of the textile through the Diploma of the trades of art in realization of costume enabled me to test the feelings of a textile carapace. In a second time, my three years of painting on fabrics at the “Ateliers Beaux arts de la Ville de Paris” brought me a place of pictorial expression on fabrics. It is in a last time, that I developed within the framework of a Master 2 of research in visual art, a research-creation relating to the symbolic transposition of the menstrual blood in a pictorial gesture and which falls under the development of a process in direct bond with the materiality of the fabric and the textile painting. This idea of transgenerational transmission is fundamental as my practice of flowing on layered fabric refers to ancient hygienic protections and entangled wounds/trauma.
Here, the emotional, psychic, and physical embodiment with paint and fabric constitutes both a reappropriation of my body and a protection. In parallel to this pictorial practice, I developed that of the self-portrait and the portrait by fixing my glance or that on the photographs of the women of my family and by trying to look very little at the sheet in order to give to see nonvisible emotions and expressions.
© Aurore Le Ludec