excerpt from the introduction…

unmentionables is my collection of embodied sculptures, scribbled sketchbook notes, and emotive prose that represent healing from sexual trauma while rape culture persists. The silencing associated with rape occurs in both the act and the aftermath. A private violation becomes publicly shamed. While healing is individual, healing can also be collective. It can be contagious. The words and visuals that follow make this sensation material so that it can be addressed. Each component of unmentionables is fragmented, but together they form a whole: the candid truth of a rape survivor. I am the survivor.

In the first part, the body in the bedroom landscape conveys how rape stains the violated spaces of the body and bedroom. To authentically embody the inescapable sensation of living with sexual trauma, my own furniture becomes overgrown by an invasive species of latex skin. This baby pink skin is irritated and infected, a recognizable depiction of the trauma. We do not see many accurate examples of survivors healing from rape. The representation of feminine bodies as objects throughout the canon of art history does not help the empowerment of living feminine bodies. In various stages of healing, my sculptures are uncomfortably intimate with themselves as they tenderly search for self-love. Once in public, they contort in pain as they directly acknowledge their state of fragmentation.

In the second part, the materiality of goopiness confronts the implications of social taboos on the rape survivor. These taboos emerge from the heteropatriarchy and phallocentrism that linger today through misogyny and rape culture. For myself, the implications of the power dynamics of rape are inextricably linked with interpretations of the vulva as monstrous and internal goopiness as grotesque. Abject theory permits us to look under the rug or beneath our skin, to be faced with this shamed goop. Goopiness thus reveals itself as a material that can narrate the shamed survivor’s experience of healing.

In the third part, the fragmented self/other reclaims the survivor’s connection to their self, left fragmented after rape emotionally and physically. During a traumatic event, the body and mind protect the collective self by going into survival mode. The body therefore does not accurately process what is happening, so the fragmented memories and lingering trauma become sensorially locked in the body. My sculptures embody this and confront you to generate body-to- body sensations. They implore you to spend time with them, and as this continues, a realization emerges among you and the sculptures themselves that together, they are whole.