The fragility, but also weight of these vessels means that my best option is to transport them myself, carefully packed in my luggage when I go to Berlin to install my next show. The labour of transporting materials meant to represent my externalized (non)self, as I wrote about two posts ago, is this time experienced as physical burden moreso than bureaucratic burden—just like a real uterus! Only in this instance, I have eight of them, each a different size and shape.
Subscribers may recognize the above image (in part) from the header used in my newsletter. Since beginning my PhD in 2019, I have been developing this vision for an organically shaped, multi-chambered, interconnected and uterine/menstrual fluid-like bioreactor to house my menstrual-derived cells in a gallery setting. A bioreactor is an in vitro chamber used for tissue engineering that is essentially an externalized (artificial) womb. This is a concept that bioartists (and friends/ mentors) Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, as well as others, have long addressed with their work.1 Working with this concept can open up discussion around the technological commodification (and control) of reproductive labour, which I have also previously written about.2 For me, making this association through gorgeous artistic objects that are overt in their visual, material and mechanical demonstration of the concept are meant to serve that purpose—by both seducing with beauty and then punching delightfully hard with explicitness. Below are a series of process sketches and photographs of the bioreactor build, still in progress.
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