Blood on Their Hands
Completion Date:
December 2023, for unit 1.1, Form Frame Fracture Exercise.
Materials:
Mixed media: ink, bleach, cotton paper, pencils, 23 carat gold leaf, tape, glue, corrugated cardboard, string.
Process:
I revisited this ink and bleach method that I haven’t done since art school.
Different renders are achieved when using bleach over ink than ink over bleach.
I also experimented with hiding messaging with various techniques such as pencil underneath ink, embossing over ink, and writing over ink.
In situ journalling: throughout the making of this piece, I kept my journal to hand to write down any notes, observations, feelings and ideas that came to me during the making. This journalling helped to move the piece forward as ideas sprang to mind about the next phase of the making.
The messages written using these methods convey my research, thoughts and opinions regarding social constructs, patriarchal constructs, the fact that wars are largely premeditated, orchestrated and fought by men.
Artwork Description:
Blood on Their Hands is an exploration of war as a patriarchal construct. It is a paper sculpture, with an accompanying piece of prose, and lastly concluded as a piece of performance art where it is set alight in the desert.
A paper-sculpture of a large central obelisk signifies male domination with a literal depiction of a phallus. Upon closer inspection, the words ‘blood on their hands’ appear on the front bottom third of the obelisk, obscured by being severed. The entire of the obelisk is covered in abstract artworks depicting bloodshed, since many of the territories, borders and countries we know today, have been demarcated as a result of war and bloodshed. They reap what they sow. War begets war.
The tip of the obelisk depicts a skull surrounded by gold, which has been cut up into a mosaic and re-positioned around the tip to signify the fractured humanity that is as a result of patriarchal constructs. The tip of the obelisk is a signifier for the male mind.
Tethered around the obelisk, flare eight ribbons of prayer flags, symbolizing feminine energy. Patriarchal societies have forced feminine energies to become reliant upon them, hence them being tethered, but at the same time desperate to escape. Each ribbon is host to an array of fractured messages and ideas around patriarchal constructs such as war and borders, a plea to cease this way of being. These prayer flags, much like those seen in Buddhist circles, are placed aloft and in a place of airflow so that their prayers and messages can be carried to the gods by the winds. The method of this messaging is again feminine: a strong voice that is tired of not being heard.
How have we let this happen?
How do we still stand by and allow this to happen before our very eyes?
And how do we make it stop?
The Idea behind Blood on Their Hands:
I started this piece a few weeks after the Israeli-Palestine war had broken out, and possibly because I live in the Middle East region, my social feeds are filled content from on-the-ground within Gaza. The pictures and videos that I am seeing of gruesome civilian fatalities, heavily weighted to women and children, have been disturbing, heartbreaking and angering – I can never un-see what I have forced myself to see. What both sides have done to one other is an abomination, nobody really knowing when this all began, but the ‘flavour’ of what they have done to one another, using violence and domination, is similar.
There is something about the texture and colour of the ink that reminds me of blood – both liquid and thick and quick to coagulate. In this piece, the ink and bleach represent the bloodshed of war.
The idea that war is a patriarchal construct. I would argue that as with so many aspects of society, the rules of play are governed by the masculine lenses through which they have been constructed. I would also argue that were women in charge, or at the very least, were they to have always had an equally important and valued voice, war would not look like it does today.
Borders too are patriarchal constructs, since it is the male of almost all species that observe and instil these manufactured and imaginary territorial lines. Borders are imaginary. They are constructs. But men will kill each other over them. They use them as lines which seek to divide, to exclude and to discriminate.
Fracture Form Frame
This is the order that I chose for this project.
Fracture: I felt that given that I am trying to depart from my usual artistic practice, that a possible starting point would be the fracture of my own process and style. I have therefore taken the concept of fracture quite literally, by not only fracturing my usual figurative style by creating abstract ink artworks, but also by slicing up an old artwork (the gilded skull), and sticking it back together in fragmented parts.
Form: I also used this part of the exercise literally, using this as an opportunity to create/form the artwork. In this instance of ‘Blood on Their Hands’ is a paper sculpture created by constructing a tower of corrugated cardboard in the shape of an obelisk. Thereafter, the obelisk is covered in fragments of the abstract bleach and ink artworks.
Frame: Frame is the process of framing the artwork, its concept, its tacit and its explicit meanings. Please see the section entitled ‘Idea’ above for how I have framed the piece.
Form Frame and Fracture has been an interesting exercise for me, but I can’t say it’s been groundbreaking or stretching in the way that I had expected it to be. This could be owing to my limited ability to envisage additional meanings behind the words form, frame and fracture. This course is revealing to me many of my weaknesses, and I am choosing to work with them instead of against them.
Having said that, I don’t think I’d have made Blood on Their Hands, had I not been obliged to fulfil the Form Frame Fracture Project requirement. I don’t like the aesthetics of the final outcome of the project – it is about the ugliest thing I’ve ever made. However, throughout the making process, I paused to take notes about any thoughts and feelings that surfaced, any ideas that I had, or any inspiration that arose. I will retype them here without editing them at all.
These are the notes that I took in situ:
- This is the ugliest thing I’ve ever made (aside from my first live figure drawing).
- Everything that I make is linked, and is making new connections as well as synaptic connections and new neural pathways in my brain. I therefore need not worry about spending ‘wasteful’ time making art that does not contribute to my improvement and technique (e.g. drawing, oil painting etc.)
- All making is important.
- All making has a place.
- The outcome/final product is an unimportant, arbitrary and moot point – the focus of my research is the practice and process in and of themselves.
- Art making like this is a very physical and visceral feeling: sitting, standing, hunching, leaning, sorting, sticking – it’s a very physical type making compared to what I’m used to.
- I will burn these prayers to the wind in the desert.
- The burning will be a part of this practice.
- The sensation of physical exhaustion from making a piece of art – it is foreign to me. My usual style is so controlled and neat, sat at a comfortable chair and desk. This one has been much crawling around on the floor and hunching over attaching the prayers to the ribbons. It’s been exhausting, and the urge to finish it is less about wanting to see how it looks, but because this subject/theme/idea weighs so heavily on me that I just want to finish it so that this can be over for me – the cathartic purging, similar to that of journaling in order to process your feelings, unpack and purge. (NOTE THE LINKS TO Dr Andrew Huberman’s Research).
During the performative part, watching smoke billowing into the air, sending all the written messages, research, and prayers that I’d fractured into the prayer flags up into the ether, it made me think about my beliefs around entanglement and interconnectedness. As the coals burned bright and the remains lay ashen on the sand, my thoughts went to the old adage “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”. I thought about carbon, and about the materials of the piece having initially come from the earth, and now going back to the earth in a different form. This has led me onto my current line of enquiry about entanglement and interconnectedness.
For this reason, Blood on Their Hands has represented a turning point for me in this course. It has been the process of this Form Frame Fracture exercise that has led me to finding my chosen line of enquiry.
References:
- Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. E-book, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, https://hdl-handle-net.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/2027/heb00482.0001.001. (accessed 18 November 2023)
- Rawat, Priti S. Patriarchal Beliefs, Women’s Empowerment, and General Well-being: Vikalpa Vol 39 No 2, 2014, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0256090920140206#:~:text=Patriarchy%20is%20a%20social%20and,relations%20between%20men%20and%20women.(accessed 22 November 2023)
- Ortner, Sherry B. Patriarchy: Feminist Anthropology Vol. 3 Issue 2 (2022) https://anthrosource-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1002/fea2.12081 (accessed 25 November 2023)
Debbie New 