Works in The Body Reclaimed celebrate personal ownership of the body and playfully insists on acceptance. This work imagines a body with processes that are free from shame and embarrassment, a body worthy of self-exploration and advanced medical attention. This work pictures my body in full embrace.
I am the youngest child of three, and so have always been defined. I remember on each of his birthdays my dad proclaiming in his booming voice, “you’re only as old as you feel!” I have always felt young and with it all of the conditions of youth: naive, gullible, trusting. I have felt afraid of getting old. When my body began showing signs of having moved beyond my youth, I felt betrayed. I needed to shift the negative feelings both self-imposed and socially taught and instead embrace the refined vitality that comes through the act of continuing to live.
Aging for me is a place where I have closely witnessed suffering and pain: my grandfather bedridden—frozen in his body from Parkinson’s disease for over a year before he finally clamped his mouth shut preventing my mother from feeding him; my dad and I, the recipients of shame delivered verbally by my grandmother as cancer ate away at her brain; my mother screaming in pain as the medical staff moved her from the gurney to the hospital bed with her fourth fractured vertebra in four months, my dad, his sprit crushed, saying, “they shouldn’t do this to people,” as the pancreatic cancer ate through his body.
In this ongoing series, I use my body, and the organic materials natural to it, to create new fictional landscapes of island topographies or a grassy meadow on a moonless night. Menstrual blood serves as land in my topographies, with a nod to my continued vitality; my pubic hairs create tall grasses against a midnight sky, while also transforming the shock of seeing my first grey pubic hair into a place of beauty and mystery. The Body Reclaimed imagines the journey of aging as an adventure. It makes space for laughter. It celebrates the interesting shapes the body and its materials can make. It demands the rights owed to menstruating bodies.