Scarlet

When having a miscarriage, you are instructed not to wear a tampon.  Instead, you need to freely pass the “artifacts of conception.”  Once this happens multiple times, you start amassing a drawer full of black period underwear so you can forego the dreaded pad and experience your loss without feeling like an unpottytrained child.  The satin and lace of the underwear seemingly mock their intention: to catch the crimson leaving your body.  I couldn’t help but associate these with the scarlet undergarments worn by medieval women to camouflage their leaked menses.  In this time period, cotton rags and moss were used to absorb menstrual blood, and because underwear was not common, they needed to create panty-like garments to keep their rag in place.  This series portrays the  manifestation of the symbolic perfect woman, ready to receive her role as mother, but painted over with red panties, which is emphasized by the use of Playboy models from 1968, ’69, and ’70. 

The threaded matchstick wrapped in crimson, and the bundles of papyrus, echo the use of ancient techniques to catch this blood.  The Greeks using sticks with lint wrapped around it, or Egyptians using softened papyrus. The Egyptians also used a red colored amulet, called the “knot of Isis,” which was found between the legs of pregnant mummies, and resembles a knot of cloth that may have been used to prevent miscarriage.  A symbol of protection and life, the myth was that a tyet was knotted by Ra and placed in Isis’s womb to protect the unborn Horus from harm or miscarriage.

The figures are paired with flowers, a symbol of fertility, but also what menstruation was sometimes referred to in medieval texts. These women carried around bouquets to deflect from any smells during their cycle.  In the Victorian era, flowers were used to deliver messages that couldn’t be spoken aloud in a symbol-based code that called Floriography.  The use of pennyroyal, rue, and tansy teas in a bouquet symbolized a warning, but they were also used as abortifacients by women to induce miscarriage.  These works have small stains of herbal tea, which is something generally avoided by pregnant women.  Through the 19th century, women menstruated for smaller percentages of time - they started later, bore children earlier and more frequently, and lived shorter lives.  There is written evidence that some women welcomed a miscarriage just to give their body rest from carrying, and then nursing, a child.