mj.
jewelery you wear on the outside that contains my inside.
mj (menstrual jewelery) is a resin jewelery set i created in which you wear a fluid we all have on the inside on the outside of your body. as a remembrance of the complicated, beautiful, but also gruesome and foreign processes happening inside us at all times, i wanted to encapsulate a piece of one of these processes and beautifully display it for the user to wear.
last week i felt as if something foreign was taking over my body- i was acting super-emotional, depressed, and tired. i attributed this to being stressed and overworked, but after my period started, i understood why i felt this way. it wasn’t until i saw the blood that i realized the intense hormonal changes i had been undergoing all week. i needed to create a reminder of the fact that our bodies are undergoing subtle and consistent fluctuations and changes all the time, and until we see the insides (blood, urine, etc) do we usually think about the innumerable processes keeping us alive and making us feel the way we do.
the process of collecting my menstrual blood required i engaged with it. this process actually disgusted me at first, and it was this process that is the heart of this set of jewelery. the fact that my own blood disgusted me made me realize that this is not just a product of my own judgments, but of societal judgments as a whole. i wanted to create something beautiful out of something that is considered “dirty” or “gross.” similar to kiki smith’s empty jars labeled with bodily fluids that may cause the viewer to be disgusted even though they are empty, i wanted to engage in a beautification process where the wearer would think the jewelery is beautiful and clean until they realize the contents.