Melissa Lindqvist

Wearable Fluids: Turning the Body Inside Out

Body Fluids by Zane Cerpina

What if you were able to wear some of your most intimate bodily fluids, such as menstrual blood, breast milk or semen, as jewellery? Visual artist Zane Cerpina created a collection of jewellery made from frozen human bodily fluids, for her performative work, ‘Body Fluids’. She explores our relationship with the ‘inside’ of our body, delving into much-contested topics such as disgust, menstruation, femininity and messiness. Wearing bodily fluids, which often possess complex emotional and visceral entanglements, on the “outside” of our body is a brutal attack on our culturally conditioned aversions to fluids and body boundaries.

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Zane Cerpina, Body Fluids, 2016 -

With:
Zane Cerpina

For one of the first performances “Woman’s Red”, Cerpina fashioned a pair of earrings and a necklace, not from gemstones but from frozen menstrual blood moulded into diamond shapes, confronting us with the notion of publicly wearing a personal fluid as a decorative item. Performers wore the jewellery until the ‘jewels’ melted, staining their clothes with their own menstrual blood and marking their skin like temporary tattoos.

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Zane Cerpina, Body Fluids, 2016 -

We are mostly made up of fluids, yet we feel the need to hide away our everyday biological functions and their resulting fluids. Cerpina’s jewellery items challenge us not to look away. At first glance many people might feel unsettled, even repulsed, but take a second look. Whether or not our general willingness to confront fluids emerging from inside the body can persist, this work tests and tries to overcome our prejudiced view.

Which secretion would you wear?