Is Your Period Art’s New Muse?

Something as normal as your period has long been heralded
as the pinnacle of cultural taboo. Women have been taught to pretend that their monthly percolation of blood doesn’t exist—that it’s a problem. Sure, we may
have moved on from a time where girls were ‘banished’ during menstruation, but why do women still go red with shame if a tampon happens to fall out of their bag? And think of all the descriptions we’ve used to describe
our monthly cycle, (painful, gross, inconvenient, to name a few). However, these six artists are changing that perception by creating powerful works of art inspired solely by our period.

PRIYANKA PAUL

The 18-year-old artist raised eyebrows
through her Goddesses series, where she reimagined them as modern-day millennials
in crop tops and bathrobes. But that didn’t
stop Priyanka from using her art to tackle
the very important issues of a woman’s
body and the stigmas surrounding periods.
Her latest menstruation series deals with breaking the stigma, specifically in the Indian and African- American society.

CINTA TORT CARTRÓ

The Barcelona-based artist is turning everything that society has deemed ‘ugly’, into beautiful works of art—from stretch marks to skin blemishes and other ‘flaws’. Like most women, she grew up hating the way she looked, but with time, learnt to accept who she is. Cinta felt it was necessary to speak out against the “male microagression towards the female body”. Now, she uses vibrant rainbow colours to celebrate these imperfections, and taboo topics like menstruation.

SARAH NAQVI

Meet the 20-year-old who sews feminist embroidery. Taking something traditional like Indian textiles, Sarah has exhibited the female form in all its glorious realness and mundanity. No, she isn’t embroidering flowers or initials or pretty motifs onto handkerchiefs or kurtas. Instead, she’s spewing strings of red wool from delicately woven vaginas, or interlacing thin ruby threads and beads onto white underwear.

TIMI PALL

The Romanian artist took nine months to create a painting of a foetus, purely out of her own menstrual blood, and called it ‘The Diary of My Period’. With a mission at hand, Timi was inspired to give birth to something which has a biological end and to create the start of the end (read: when a woman gets her period, all chances of pregnancy are eliminated and the ovum dies). Through her artwork, she wants her audience to see, talk and breathe instead of the baby.

 

RAJ KAMAL AICH

Breaking the perception that
you don’t have to be a
woman to feel for a woman,
Raj has created artwork with
blood-soaked tampons and
pads to question the Indian
government’s 12 percent GST on sanitary napkins. Through his graphic illustrations, Raj wanted to break the disgust and horror surrounding period blood. He feels that menstruation is an intrinsic part of a woman’s life and that’s why he’s juxtaposed used tampons against normal, everyday activities.

 

ZOE JAMES

Zoe’s painting, called Free Bleed, was inspired through her strong belief that menstrual products should be more affordable, as they’re more of a necessity. She was outraged by the fact that children in New Zealand were missing school because they couldn’t access basic menstrual products. Being a single mother, she was plagued by the guilt that she would need to buy tampons over food for her children. Through her artwork, Zoe confronts two big issues— dealing with the disgust around periods, and period poverty, by creating art entirely out of her menstrual blood.