An Interview with artist Vanessa Dion Fletcher Caleigh Inman At Own Your Cervix, an art installation by Vanessa Dion Fletcher at Tangled Art + Disability in early 2017, members of the public were invited to participate in cervical self-examinations inside the gallery. Everyone was welcome, no cervix necessary. In a private one-on-one session with the artist, she provides you with a speculum, lube, a mirror, and some instructions. I had the chance to do one of these self-examinations myself. As I conducted the self-exam, Vanessa sits outside the partition a Victorian settee in the centre of the room while she asks her questions. The settee - which Dion Fletcher has reupholstered, painted with her own menstrual blood, and adorned with porcupine quills is itself a part of the installation, entitled Colonial Comfort. She records our conversation, and some of the answers she receives will form the audio track for another piece of artwork she has in the gallery: a video of Dion Fletcher s cervix while she is menstruating, narrated by clips of intimate, political, and sometimes comical conversations with various participants. Recently completing her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Own Your Cervix is Dion Fletcher s first major solo exhibition. She took some time to chat with me over Skype, and we discussed bleeding, de-colonial aesthetics, and the prickly process of collecting porcupine quills. Caleigh: Most of your work at Tangled is themed around gender and menstruation. Can you tell me about why you started working with menstrual blood and what the catalyst for that was? 126
Caleigh Inman Vanessa: Yeah, I was in my early 20 s and after finishing my undergraduate degree I was trying to think about how to start my career. I was getting my period every month and I was staining my sheets and underwear as I have always done when menstruating, but at this point in my life I kind of had this moment where I wanted to develop my professional life and I was producing these stains with my body and feeling like I wasn t being a professional adult [laughter]. So I started thinking maybe I should get like a period tracker app, and start waring panty liners sooner, started thinking about all the things I could do to not makes stains and I thought I just have to do laundry better! C: So kind of a self-management thing? V: Yeah. And then I realized as I was thinking about menstruation and my body, that I was putting a certain amount of work in to the concealment of menstruation, so that was one of the first things I thought about, was the the labour of concealment, but then I also thought about the labour of the self-discipline or self-regulation. I was viewing and thinking about advertising and conversations about menstruating how it was formed in a public or social consciousness. Nobody was explicitly saying I see your underwear, and that s bad. Or, I see your stained sheets, and that s bad. There was a kind of social conversation, but I also felt like a lot of it was really internalized. An internal marker that I set for myself. From there I also started to reflect on why I felt a kind of shame, or uncomfortableness with this physical process. C: Can you talk about when the settee [ Colonial Comfort ] came into the picture? V: Yeah, that was a work that I made in Chicago during my graduate work. I purchased the couch in my first semester and had it reupholstered for my first end-of-term critique. After that I started staining the fabric. My interest in using the fabric, pattern and staining came from thinking about and looking at textiles. Seeing the visual similarity between anatomical references to female genitalia 127
AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST VANESSA DION FLETCHER in these textile patterns, and then on the contrasting side seeing my body produce the same shapes, in sometimes the same colours. The textiles have a whole beautiful aesthetic association; the stains our bodies produce have a completely different narrative around. There dirty, and shouldn t be produced at all and if it is, everything needs to be washed, hidden, or discarded. So it s an interesting tension, and I wanted to make something that would, make people think about it. The settee has that relationship to your body, you know its furniture, so it puts your body in a situation where you imagine, sitting on it, it s something that is meant to hold the body. So, you have to think about how close you want to get to the it to the blood stains. the aesthetic of the staining looking quite beautiful against the patterning, but it s still abject. I didn t add the quills until my final semester, it was in my studio the whole time I was working, and then when I was putting my final show together, I had been working with quills for some other projects and one day got the idea to add them to the couch. C: When I saw the couch I saw it being a very unsettling piece, I imagined someone sitting down on it and getting poked in the butt or something [laughter], like you are not supposed to be sitting here! Was this piece intended to be seen in a decolonial context? V: Absolutely, I definitely wanted to add the quills to bring in a more of a decolonial context, and I was working with the quills and beadwork and trying to think of how to bring in that perspective a little bit more. And that s definitely what I m hoping for. For me personally I always saw the work with in a decolonial context because I understand the sigificance of my menstrual blood symbolically as an indigenous woman, but that connection was not obvious to everyone and the quills add a lot of power. I like that there is more agency in the work. C: I m curious, how did you acquire the porcupine quills? V: I did an internet search, and I found a store in Etobicoke that sells quills and various other hides and animal materials. I also did 128
Caleigh Inman a bunch of research about quills, and if you re not gonna buy them from a store, a common way to get them is from roadkill. So if you see a porcupine you ll stop, and I ve had friends talk about their family members doing this, they ll be driving, and someone will be like pull over, we ve gotta grab this porcupine! [laughter]. I ve also heard that another way is to get a blanket and tie strings to the ends, and go out into the woods and find a porcupine [and then throw the blanket over it and then the the porcupine will shoot its quills into the blanket, the blanket off, and pull the quills. C: Oh my god! V: And you know, they have like, thousands of quills, the quills are like, it s hair, so they don t shoot them all at once - they shoot the quills and they regrow. C: So that s a defense mechanism then? V: Yes. Quills were used before the introduction of glass beads in native communities to embellish, as a decorative art form, so there s this association with them in terms of the protection they provide for the porcupine, and then there s this incredible history of, quill work, as a medium so the tension is that they can be very protective but also dangerous, for the animal and for people working with them. People who work with them get lots of little pokes all the time. C: Yeah, they re beautiful, but also kind of scary. V: I should add that on the settee there is the upholstery fabric with the damask pattern in it, the quills are also something that were used in Indigenous communities to create other kinds of patterning within textile mediums. I m using both Indigenous and European methods and iconography in the work. C: In your bio you write about accessing your Indigenous languages, and how it has been an ongoing challenge because of colonial 129
AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST VANESSA DION FLETCHER language loss and also the experience of having a learning disability. You write that this connection to communication is fractured and politicized. Can you expand on that a bit? V: My maternal grandmother grew up speaking English. her parents, my great grandparents I m not sure how much of the language they spoke, but I do know that my grandmother remembers them singing in Lenape. I grew up learning, speaking English, learning to read in English, learning to write in English, and I had an incredibly hard time. I was diagnosed with a learning disability in grade three, but it was immediately apparent as soon as you started school, really in grade one, that I was not functioning in the same way that other students were. I was very aware, from the time I was six, that I wasn t learning in the same way that my peers were and I wasn t accomplishing the goals set out my school. I wasn t performing in the way that was expected of me, and it was really hard. Similarly to some of the things we talked about in terms of menstruation, I had a lot of the same feelings. I felt like I wasn t a good student, or a good person, because I wasn t meeting institutional expectations. At the same time in these early ears of my life, I was learning the joy and pain of my Indigenousness. I learned why I spoke English Residential schools, Moravian Missionaries, forced removal, assimilation, survival. I learned my indigenous ancestors were made to feel the same failure shame and fear about speaking their languages as I was about not being able to communicate in English. The Lenape community I come from has very few speakers, a handful of elders who still speak fluently. I knew there was another world, a world with indigenous languages. I knew that world had existed, but it did not exist for me. I was told our languages were oral languages filled with stories not written down. This world became my utopia. I imagined this world of indigenous language as a fictional place because colonialism made it unreal and unattainable. As a fictional place, I imagined it in all the perfection a utopic imagining allows for. I inverted the failure shame and fear of English when I imagine Lenape and Potawatomi. 130
Caleigh Inman C: So much of your work at Tangled communicates through different mediums, mostly not written. Does your experience with language learning shape the ways that those different methods of communication are built into the work? V: I think so. I don t know if I can speculate on where that comes from, but I definitely like using lots of different strategies, and exploring different material or methods for how to think about a topic and coming at it from different places. C: The theme for our journal this year is interdependency, and we ve been thinking about it in the context of rejecting the valorization of independence and moving towards enacting more community based support networks and radical access, and thinking about interdependency between people but also between different communities, movements, different types of creatures, and so on. So I am wondering in the context of your work, what does interdependency mean to you? V: I think that this exhibition speaks to interdependency in several different ways. Participants in the self-exams are very generous in sharing their experiences and their experiences of their bodies with me. They express the value they find in being depended and responsible to family, friends, lovers, kin. One of the questions I ask is why did you accept the invitation? The first few times I held self-exams it was in the installation still set up in my studio at school. The people I invited were mostly friends and classmates, people I knew well and who had been supportive of me. Many of them answered that the first reason they came was that I had asked them. At first, I was disappointed? Or concerned about that answer wondering if I needed to change the invitation or the installation to make it more inviting or relevant or interesting to an audience. But then I thought, I m really learning something about the people in my life and the time and care they are willing to devote to help me think about my work. I had discovered a whole pool of people that were willing to support me in a way I did not know before. That was a really important lesson for me. I learned how I can depend on my community in so 131
AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST VANESSA DION FLETCHER many different ways, what I can ask of them. I also learned to think really hard about what I m asking of my community because of the same thing. I hope that the self-exams are mutually beneficial and that participants feel like it s an opportunity that they can enjoy, have fun, reflect? In some ways even though one could learn it many places I m the one who ends up teaching a skill. I teach how to use a speculum how to view a cervix and give some ways that all people might think about how they view their bodies or other bodies in a social and cultural context. Author Bio Caleigh Inman is a fourth year Equity Studies student at the University of Toronto. Her research focusses on the intersections of disability justice and decolonization. In her free time, she enjoys baking pies and volunteering at Tangled Art + Disability. 132