Placenta 2011-15

Here Rucquoi has worked with the body in a more direct manner. The body has become a source of drawing material.

Prints are made on to paper using the body’s only impermanent organ – the placenta. Its role in pregnancy is to support and unite, it is fundamental to our existence and yet many people maybe repelled by its bloody and visceral nature. By incorporating this material into her faceless portraiture Rucquoi translates the experience of the maternal bond into a language of its own. Her use of blood challenges the perceptions of it as a bodily fluid we associate with disease and trauma.

The gold ‘halos’, influenced by the imagery of the Madonna and Child, elevate the prints with a sense of divinity and holiness.