Luzene Hill - Retracing the Trace

 Hello to all the lovely creatures out there!

In today's post we are talking about the contemporary artist Luzenne Hill and how she interprets the experience of sexual assault, especially for Native American women through her artwork "Retracing the Trace".

A little bit about her: Caroline Luzene Hill is a Native American multimedia artist and her works draw from deeply personal and difficult experiences related to violence against women and indigenous cultures, exploring themes of the trauma and shame hat can be produced by these experiences. She combines performance with installation to reflect on violence against women, using lyrical abstraction to approach difficult topics.

She is best known for her 2011-2015 work called "Retracing the Trace" , an installation reflecting on the prevalence and pain of sexual assault through Hill's own experience. [Please note that there will some graphic discription of a rape attack on the rest of this paragraph, so if it is a sensitive issue for you, please continue on the next one!] On January 4, 1994 Luzanne Hill was attacked, beaten and raped in Piedmont Park in Atlanta. As she herself stated later: "Rape is not about sex, it's about power and rage. A woman is made powerless and she is silenced". The rapist had attacked Hill, grabbed her from behind, and strangled her with cords. Those traces of violence remained in her neck for the next six months, like a constant reminder of being silenced.

"Retracing the Trace" presented an imprint of rape and exposition of the number of unreported sexual assaults that occur within a twenty-four hour period in the United States. The foundation for this work derived from the original marks of Hill's own trauma and was realized by inserting her body into the process of making an imprint. This installation had three components. Numbers, indicating each hour in a day, were stenciled in a line around the gallery walls. Material volume, knotted cords, was pooled on the floor around the outline of Hill's body and re-presented the traces of violence left in the leaves and mud where she was attacked. Each cord signified a specific number between one and 3.780 the estimated number of unreported rapes that occur in the United States each day. 

Hill borrowed principles of the Inka khipu, an ancient cord knotting system used for accounting and storytelling, to count and give voice to those women who remain silent. The third element was her daily ritual of moving a portion of the cords from the floor to the walls. These three parts merged into one visual image by the end of the exhibit. The body trace of violence slowly diminished, then disappeared, through her ritual. The counting cords that had been on the floor encircled the gallery walls in a unified, reckoning retrace of the marks left on her neck. 

Hill is one of the many artists that expressed her attack and violation of her own body through her art, and specifically decided to incorporate a part that played a big role in her attack (the cord) to that expression. Not many artists are that comfortable to include such a thing, (though I doubt comfortable is in any case the right word) however Hill wanted to express how she felt, when she felt it and through her piece to diffuse that feeling into the rest of her audience, to sympathize with her. It is quite symbolic and at the same time quite urgent to not avert our eyes from the violence inflicted on women every day, especially to marginalized groups.

I hope this post gave you just a little bit of food for thought, as always thank you for reading and I will see you in a next post!

xoxoxo