ARTIST STATEMENT
For the survivors.
Give Them Their Flowers is a series of blackout poems made from pages of the Victorian-era erotic memoir My Secret Life. By obscuring the book’s voyeuristic and misogynistic language, the work transforms a document of exploitation into a space for reclamation. As symbols of renewal, flowers bloom through redacted text, with the remaining fragments forming poems that honor the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse, foregrounding their courage and resilience.
Linking Victorian social privilege to contemporary systems of wealth, secrecy, and protection, the series exposes how power continues to shape whose stories are believed. Ornate Victorian gold frames and velvet encase each piece, echoing the era’s fixation on wealth, status, and control — symbolizing the power structures that enabled exploitation then and now.
Along the torn edge of each page, gold leaf invokes the Japanese art of Kintsugi, repairing what is broken with care, suggesting that harm can be acknowledged without being allowed to define the whole.
Give Them Their Flowers is both resistance and care: a reclamation of narrative, a critique of entrenched power, and a tribute to women who continue to endure and rise after experiencing sexual assault. Through erasure, it creates space for truth; through poetry, it restores dignity; and through its final gesture, it plants seeds for a future where oppressive narratives can no longer take root.
The artist’s percentage of proceeds from art sales supports Woman Made Gallery.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Julie Carpenter is an arts administrator and interdisciplinary artist whose socially engaged practice examines the relationships between gender, power, and cultural memory. Working across text-based media she uses strategies of erasure, reclamation, and poetic reconstruction to challenge dominant narratives and foreground voices historically marginalized or silenced. Her work often engages archival texts, transforming materials shaped by patriarchal or exploitative histories into spaces for agency and reflection. In her series Give Them Their Flowers, Carpenter reconfigures documents of harm through redaction and symbolism, creating works that honor survivors of sexual abuse while interrogating the cultural systems that enables abuse and protects power. Across her practice, Carpenter is committed to art as a portal for care, critique, and collective witnessing. Her work invites viewers to confront the persistence of structural inequity while imagining futures in which oppressive narratives no longer carry influence.
© Julie Carpenter