Blood Flowers

Bones were the first non-edible remains from our rabbits I worked with creatively. Bones are cool. Bone jewelry was easy to get into, and there are plenty of examples. Articulation was a little harder, and likely inevitable for an anatomy nerd such as myself.

We rarely see our bones, and apart from teeth, seeing them minimally is best. We might see them as food. It’s easy to interact with bones for sale as abstracted from their living creatures. Fur, especially in pelt form, is a little harder to keep removed.

Blood and guts are the hardest.

I’ve done screenprinting with blood in the past, but I wanted to relinquish the control that process requires – wanted to let each rabbit speak for herself, so to speak. And I’ve dried organs, coated them in epoxy, done wet preserves… The outcomes were not satisfying.

Enter the new blood prints.

This was printed with the heart and lungs of Fats, from Adele and Pinkerton’s first litter together. The liver also creates lush blossom shapes. The only part added is the black line to suggest a flower, and the wooden frame I handmade from locally reclaimed fence wood.

A sense of reverence for the rabbits and respect for audiences at markets has been core to this work. I’m grateful for the wide variety of people – meat eaters, vegans, farmers, oddity seekers – who have embraced Myoflorae’s work so far. And I’ve been searching for a beauty with sharper teeth.

I see when people take one look at bone art and hurry by. That’s truly fine in terms of aesthetics. I suppose the trickster in me wants to seduce those who might see the beauty of dead plants into seeing the beauty of dead animals, too.

Beyond a bit of trickery, I want to exalt the nourishment death in its many forms provides for us. I want to remind myself to grieve and be thankful to the stilt grass I harvest for the rabbits just as much as I do for the rabbits themselves, and as much as I may hope to receive one day.

Many cultures, societies, and individuals across time and space have known this more deeply and said it more eloquently. Still, I’ll say it for myself, and for you to hold as you can right now: the further we push death away, the further we are from life. Let’s hold hands with death as we skip along living.