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Her Body Speaks True (Advanced Healing 1)
Date
May 2020
Medium
Washi covered shikishi board, hydrocolloidal plasters, ink of incense ash, blood and egg yolk, acrylic medium, cast natural latex and blood, Sharpie, lead pencil mounted on archival board.
Dimensions
78.4cm x 61cm
Between 2107 and early 2020 my art was a mode for exploring and giving voice to trauma and whistle blowing in the light of exposing the gross misdeeds of my Tibetan Spiritual Teacher whom I followed for 17 years. The art produced in this period was not intended to be representative of memories, but rather, was about how experience and form activate sensations. In Her Body Speaks True (Advanced Healing 1) I employed material poetics and text to explore religious abuse, turning to the lines of Cixous to harness elements of my body that were once suppressed. I wrote the following verse after speaking at the Sakyadhita International Buddhist Women’s conference and it serves as the basis for this artwork:
My body was the thread through which I could stand and speak before 800 women.
Half hidden, half visible.
Yet never without its full presence missing.
That which was surrendered, dominated into submission has already been rehabilitated, reborn.
Born from the ground of all possibilities.
Given breath by infinite space itself.
“All of her passes into her voice...Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare.”*
*Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen “The Laugh of the Medusa” in Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), 875- 893
