Blood Mud Rub

Blood Mud Rub (2017) is a film I made in response to the clay gestures seen below and in fact a response to the foot washing.

It is a ritualistic poetic expression of the sensuality, intelligence and agency of the body, and its connection to the environment. I contrast the natural environment symbolized by the materials of earth, water, blood with the modern –the world of technology and concrete.

I am interested in the roots of our culture, the original departure of body from nature and the formations of self and ‘other’. The legitimization of language and the privileging of the written word throughout history have completely denied the embodied knowledge and memory of the ‘indigenous body’.

In this regard it is essential that my work finds a way back to the immediacy of our lived experience and to communicate and therefore relate through the body, as a means to pull away from the ‘empire of signification’ that sees language as the only way to cross the abyss formed by the divisions of modern dualism. The ‘phallus always refers outside itself’, which simultaneously forms a dependency on the ‘other’ to define itself against and a ‘gap’ or separation from ‘other’ which needs to be filled (Grosz 1989, p.47)

Both Blood Mud Rub and the clay gestures are an exploration of how the body communicates in a simple pre-verbal way, I cross the ‘abyss’ by using the body. I used my hands and feet to make imprints and marks in the clay – to record a moment of contact.

Here is a language which is visceral, non-linear, and universal, connected to the earth and pointing to a wider swath of human history beyond our current civilization.