Bleed or Bleed?
"Bleed or Bleed?" is a collective visual essay about "periods". It is made with cardboard, cotton pads, thread, and tissues. In this project, I interviewed and collected stories from women of different ages and cultural backgrounds. I hope that through this project people can have a deeper and more novel understanding of what women go through every month. This project was exhibited at the "flip it" group exhibition of the first-year illustration graduate students at Syracuse University.
2021.10
This project mainly involved interviewing, research, sketching, and finishing. Initially, my professor gave us only one week, so I hastily interviewed female classmates around me and created digital sketches. Later, the professor suggested me to interview women of different age groups and turning it into a physical book and integrating it with menstrual products. With the deadline got extented, I interviewed my mother and our church's pastor, and I found that their perspectives were different from the earlier interviewees.
I used questions as the titles for the themes in the work. I prefer questions over statements because I believe questions can stimulate thinking, and everyone can interprets it in his/hers one ways.
Through summarizing the interview content, I identified seven topics and presented them in the form of questions:
- Prepared or disaster? - Are you always prepared, or do disasters strike?
- Enjoy now or Maybe next time? - Do you enjoy the present or postpone?
- Roller coaster or Carousel? - Is it like a roller coaster or a carousel?
- Hygiene or Make-do? - Do you choose hygiene or make-do?
- Pills or Pains? - Do you take pills or endure pain?
- Sweet burden or heavy freedom? - Is it a sweet burden or restrictive freedom?
- Be afraid or be brave? - Are you afraid or brave?
In the end, I designed the cover to resemble a sanitary pad, attached bits of cotton pads to the cardboard to simulate texture, and used red thread for binding, connecting the content of each theme. The cover also incorporated red thread elements, not just for visual effect but also to keep the entire booklet together without falling apart. Finally, for the exhibition, I roughly created a box resembling a "napkin disposal" box to collect and distribute survey questionnaires.
