Bloodletting Menstruation Art by Jennifer Weigel
Let’s take a brief intermission from the creepy comic collages to talk about my show opening next weekend shall we… I have been involved in menstruation awareness and reproductive rights advocacy through my art for over a decade. Some of these pieces are very intentionally horrific, either to raise awareness of injustices that can and are occurring, or to poke fun at some perceptions associated with the supposed terrors of menstruation.
With the new show coming and considering my recent interviews with Broken Doll Head, I thought I’d share some highlights from the genre as a teaser, including this Lil Miss Spurtz video from Halloween 2017.
Lil Miss Spurtz
My persona Lil Miss Spurtz was my crass and inappropriate avatar of menstruation who appeared in a series of videos released on a schedule of… wait for it… every month. Here she is having a Psycho Carrie moment while trying to take a shower.
Relic
This sculpture incorporates a textured handmade paper moon goddess face in silver, a small jar of saffron signifying wealth, faux insects, candles, and a rubber fetus. Pro-life advocates were known to hand such rubber fetuses to women entering abortion clinics, but many have appeared in art in various forms. This is meant to remind one of the old religious collections of found objects and human bits and pieces supposedly belonging to saints, prophets, apostles and even Christ himself. I’ve always found this history both creepy and fascinating.
Death Sentence
This artwork, as seen in the recent Bodies anthology, is a more direct advocacy piece based upon the Pro-Life Nation article chronicling events that were happening in El Salvador more than two decades ago. My piece predates the overturn of Roe v Wade and focuses on some possibilities in the aftermath of such political action. It has appeared in various forms; this iteration includes a maternity shirt hung on the wall at human height with tangled fiber art accents that spill down the wall and onto the floor. Another, with the inclusion of my own menstrual blood, recently appeared in Roe 2.0 at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago IL USA.
Text reads: Gang-raped, beaten and left in a back alley to die. Pro-life nation has made it illegal to abort. The doctors say that the fetus is lodged in my fallopian tube. Carrying this child to term will most certainly kill me. This is my death sentence. My rapists, after serving only a brief time in jail, are allowed to go free.
Note: if you purchase Bodies through the link provided you will earn some money for Haunted MTL as well, and proceeds benefit charity. So Dark Lord Cthulhu says, “What are you waiting for? Shop away!”
Anyway, I wanted to share these pieces as I gear up for my next big function associated with this series of work, the release of my Ebb and Flow Journal which will be installed in Miami AZ for a year to garner donations of feminine care products for local shelters and food pantries there.
Feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or on her writing, fine art, and conceptual projects websites.
This is the kickoff to a new series exploring nature that is kind of horrifying, at least in ways. Our first subject is Vampires Among Us. There are lots of animals named for vampires, sometimes due to folklore and sometimes for their appearance (like the Vampire Squid), but most of these animals don’t have blood sucking tendencies.
Bats & Birds
There are legit vampire leaf-nosed bats in Central and South America that drink blood. They feed on mammals and are often shown to feed on livestock. They’d be kinda cute if they weren’t so creepy. There are also vampiric birds: some finches in the Galapagos have developed the taste for blood of other birds, mainly seabirds that flock to the islands to raise their young.
Leeches & Lampreys & More
And then you get into leeches and lampreys and other denizens of the water that are known to attach themselves to larger creatures and drink their blood. Leeches were even believed to have medicinal value (and still are in certain circumstances). And there are also numerous plants that are known to be parasitic and feed on other plants, wrapping their roots or vines around others to steal nutrients.
Spiders
Now I’m going to drift off into the realm where this becomes truly horrific. Spiders. Now, spiders aren’t vampires per se, seeing as how they actually kill their prey – they don’t just feed off of it while it remains living and wanders about its business. But because of their structure, they cannot eat solid foods, so they have to inject their prey with enzymes to liquefy it so they can slurp it out like a protein shake. That’s sort of vampirism on steroids if you ask me, just the kind that no one is coming back from.
Bloodsucking Bugs
But let’s get back on topic. Now let’s consider mites and ticks and fleas and mosquitoes and the like. Some drink blood for their survival; others do so as part of their reproductive cycle (like mosquitoes which otherwise eat fruit and nectar but need the extra protein from blood to grow their eggs).
Ticks need to feed on blood once at every stage of their life cycle and can pick up diseases along the way (like Lyme Disease) but don’t always do so. Different ticks are more likely to come in contact with different things and often humans are not their preferred meal but they are opportunistic and will feed on whatever is available when necessary. Symptoms of illness from tick bites may take years to develop and can have really weird side effects (like the allergy associated with Lone Star Ticks which makes a person unable to consume mammalian flesh).
Anyway, here are some brief glimpses of vampirism in nature. Thank you for joining us for Nightmarish Nature and may you avoid getting bitten by any true vampires among us… And I still think spiders take first place in the creepy eating category here, even if they aren’t technically vampiric.
This story came to me in a sort of roundabout way from a rather unusual source. So I thought I’d share it with you, dear readership, and see if you can make heads or tails of it. – Jennifer Weigel
Dread Pirate Rum Tum Tugger could tell this was the right spot.
The site, beneath the sweeping limbs of the Live Oak, Spanish Moss swaying gently in the breeze, was a perfect match to the crude map he had bought off that soothsayer Deuteronomy.
The earth moved easily, as if it had been excavated previously. He dug in with greater fervor with each swipe. The sandy soil gave way to reveal something hard. He scooped and smoothed the remaining detritus from the surface as he uncovered a box.
The carton was simple.
No markings; no ornamentation; no writing. Just a plain cardboard crate, brittle from having been buried for so long but still sturdy. He hoisted it from its burrow.
“Ha HO!” he shouted to the passing breeze, rousing a small cloud of birds that erupted from a nearby thicket. They captured his attention for a moment, but he quickly refocused and returned to his task.
The box was locked but no difference.
Any self-respecting ruffian like himself could pick a lock in seconds. And he did so with panache, as was his way. He pried the lid open and licked his lips.
Inside was the legendary Kernel of Eternal Life, a small sparrow’s heart, still beating.
Artwork description: Myself as Dread Pirate Queen Miss Kitty wearing black bell sleeve shirt and black vinyl skirt with strapping leather belt over leopard print shirt and tights, with strapping leather boots, pirate head wrap and leopard cat ears.
Image text reads: Purr! Avast ye mateys, Dread Pirate Queen Miss Kitty invites ye to check out her booty stash and dig ye up a dungbie prize. Seek ye some buried treasure! Just grab ye a plastic litter scoop and dig… dig… dig… to ye heart’s content.
I created this image for a promotional poster for a performance piece in a charity art show in which I, as Dread Pirate Queen Miss Kitty, hawked a carnival sideshow style sidewalk installation. For a mere $5 donation to the animal shelter the show supported, gallery goers could dig around in a kiddie pool full of litter to find a prize: a cheap plastic trinket from the dollar store. I had some takers, including one kid who seemed to really enjoy the digging and whose parents were all in, saying “You know, you can totally do that at home too.”
For more cat antics, we invite you to read C-2747’s logbook here on Haunted MTL. Feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or on her writing, fine art, and conceptual projects websites.
Happy Mother’s Day to the Queen of Everything… nothing gets by you.
Artwork description: A Happy Mother’s Day card featuring a picture of a Nefertiti doll with swooping hair, glitter makeup, and elaborate gold and blue headdress and evening gown.
Image text reads: Happy Mother’s Day! You are the Queen of Everything and you shimmer brighter than the twinkliest star in the sky. Stay sparkly and shine on in your magnificent glitter bombasticness. You ARE truly everything everywhere all at once and you’ve seen and heard it all. Eyes in the back of your head and superpowered hearing mean we can’t get away with much no matter how hard we try. So Queen on and rule over home in sparkly sentinel.
And may this be a testament to why us kids shalt never get you out of bed too early or run amok while you are getting ready to start your day… Because being the Queen of Everything takes planning and preparation…
Feel free to check out this Mummy Dearest Mother’s Day card from 2021 here on Haunted MTL.
