This is the medium Jasmine Alicia Carter paints with – still
perfectly fresh: watery, dark crimson red.
It’s blood – her own.
This is my period blood, and I paint with it.
After every cycle, the artist processess her experiences and
feelings of the past month through her painting.
In 2016, she started painting with her own menstrual blood.
But she had to get used to the idea first.
Ok, am I really doing this?
This is really weird, you know, like I've never seen something, I
just felt the urge, and I was just having the willingness of I want to
go deep because my periods are just so painful.
They have been so painful.
I had to get cocktails of medicines in the hopes to make it go away and
mostly, at times, not even the meds could help, and this constant
feeling of having to hide them and just not understanding where to put
them, like it was just too much.
Art has helped Jasmine Alicia Carter: She paints with a brush or
with her fingers on watercolor paper.
She collects her blood with a menstrual cup and can keep it in
the fridge for several days.
When Jasmine started painting at age 25, she had no precedents to
follow, so she developed her own techniques.
It just has this aliveness.
It just goes where it has to go in a certain way, and it also makes it
a little bit difficult because I need to understand it.
Sometimes, it's a little bit more slimy, sometimes it's a little bit
more liquid and ready.
So, I just have to kind of flow with it in a certain sense.
And sometimes, I have to separate the more slimy part from
the more reddish parts.
Like, it's something that requires a lot of work, and I love that, I
personally love it so, so, so much.
Many of my clients say, I'm having so many clots, how can I
resolve this issue?
Right, it also to come with also taking care of your womb health, so
it's a side effect.
Part of having such a beautiful pigment of blood to be able to
create nice artwork is also in parallel to have
a very healthy womb.
For Jasmine, her art goes beyond the personal.
As a body mentor, she tries to encourage others to get to know
their own bodies.
She’s even founded a movement for menstrual art.
But on social media, her work is not always well received.
I also received blackmail sometimes.
Sometimes, they tell me, ‘you should never come to my country, or
we will jail you, we will slaughter you.’ Like they get really deep
into this, they curse me, all possible ways.
Everything about the woman is considered so taboo.
Breaking the taboos surrounding menstruation is also the theme of
an exhibition at Berlin’s Museum of Europäischer Kulturen.
The exhibition deals with issues like hygiene products and
the shifting social attitudes towards woman’s periods through the
ages.
Curator Jana Wittenzellner has also created a space for
discussion about menstruation.
It concerns half of humankind directly and the
other half indirectly.
And what it’s about when we talk about menstruation is in fact least
of all the blood itself.
The core of the matter: everyday objects, the topics and discourses
and much, much more that we come in contact with on a daily basis.
Many of the pieces on exhibit come burdened with norms
and preconceptions about the menstrual period.
Artists’ representations also reveal the ways menstruating women
are politically disadvantaged and routinely stigmatized.
Art could lift the taboos on the topic and
encourage greater visibility.
Is it very taboo in Vietnam, and also, from the material I read,
it's a really taboo in many societies.
The exibition is shocking and forces people to ask why some are
repulsed by menstruation.
For Jasmine, menstrual painting is a way to feel more in tune with
her entire body.
The artist is now grateful for the period she once found so
painful and hated.
For me, bringing period, that is something so stigmatized, something
so taboo, that's something that has so much charge for so many people,
and put it into a context of beauty is so healing on its own.
And it's part of my message and how I want to bring forth my message
into the world.
Through her art, both aesthetic and controversial, Jasmine Alicia
Carter turns the spotlight on women's menstrual cycles and
invites people to shift their perspective.