86 x 71 cm
There cannot be an archive without some form of death, without a physical presence of that which no longer exists.
Through the years, when working with a personal trauma, I tried to ensure that the work was not only interesting to me, but that it was also important for others in some way. Now, my interests in art have shifted and I am no longer working with my own experiences. Now, I am very much concerned with the pain of others.
- Priscilla Monge
To explore the “unspeakable” she often turns to materials in the domestic and
scholastic sphere. She employs items such as fabric, chalkboards, soap, and fine china to weave delicate yet arresting narratives of cruelty and innocence, blurring the lines between love and aggression, pleasure and oppression. For her, these everyday materials hold “the possibility of being familiar and unfamiliar at the same time”, allowing her to explore the small everyday atrocities that can permeate our lives. In one such work, Bloody Day, she has sewn a pair of trousers out of sanitary napkins and walked around the streets of San Jose, soaked in her own period blood. Such a work highlights her focus on politicizing the personal and showing the violence that often remains hidden; in this case using the sanitary napkin to bring into the open the internal violence that women must bear within their body’s borders, whilst simultaneously demonstrating the fear and shame of the larger patriarchal society in which they must bear it.
