. Painting

A surreal painting about menstruation. Few people think about it as a simple physical feature, but overload it with prejudice, misinformation, misogyny and other stupidities. It really isn't that weird, it just IS. Deal with it. Oil painting over an acrylic pouring, using silhouettes and silver metallic paint. The four moons in four stages symbolise the four weeks from one period to the next. Beneath each, seven crosses like in a calender have been scratched out with the knife to show the paint layers underneath; this represents the seven days per week, and four of them are cycled - because that's that average duration of a period. The egg cell about to be cast out is a cracked egg (I made it red at first, but that just looked like a blood drop), with plenty more waiting their turn in the ovaries. Finally, the sets of counting strikes to either side are thirteen and fifty-eight, typical ages of the beginning and end during a woman's lifetime. Yes, it looks like a prison inmate counting days, because natural as it is, menstruation is still a nuisance. The flower in her hand losing its petals is a carnation to represent a chance of pregnancy gone. People, both men and women, still believe that there is something strange and magical going on during the menstruation period. If a woman is cranky, they make an unoriginal joke that she must be menstruating, as if it were correlated with mood. Some even think that milk curdles when a menstruating woman passes by; where they get that medieval idea, is beyond me. Fact is: all over the world, women cannot take part in normal activities during their monthly period. Indian women have their uterus amputated so they can work more days in the month instead of staying home to staunch the bleeding; and Scottish schoolgirls miss a week per month in school because they cannot afford tampons. Let's fix those things before we ever make a joke about cranky women again, shall we?