Body Tracks - a bow to Ana Mendieta

Body Tracks - materials: menstrual blood, mud from the moor, lining paper.

Duration: roughly 11 minutes. (clean-up time could be included, because clean-up time is always interesting to me, especially when blood gets on white walls made by a sliding knee).

The video is an edited version of events, the agency is on the paper - my body expressed her-self(s) fully - contours / curves. The aliveness was reciprocal, I felt.

This is a bloody muddy declaration of existence - because existence is just that: bloody and muddy. These could be body tracks of the living or dead. Of life or murder.

I draw my own body, I inhabit my gesture. Inspired by Ana Mendieta's performative piece of the same name - and as a way to inhabit her work, I reactivate her gesture by climbing inside her action, taken years ago (around the time I was born), through the re-enactment, re-embodiment, I feel the potency and power of my female body.

Ana Mendieta - who died (controversially - was she murdered? likely) at a young age, younger than I am now. I remember discovering her and feeling such a deep soul resonance with her / her work / where her work was coming from - I was the same age in my discovery of her as she was when she died - 36 years old - I remember the horror I felt, for some weeks - I remember dancing it out, some kind of prayer or gratitude mixed with horror - I still feel like I am giving thanks and nodding in her direction. I am really really glad she existed and made the art she made.

You need to ask me for the password, unless I've already given it to you.

I deliberately haven't shown images of how I made these marks.

The film shows the gestures and contact.