Pussy Riot

The last few days have been generally overcast, cold, drizzly. Despite this — and possibly because of it — masses of soft, pussy willow like flowers have braved the chilled air to burst forth and inform me that being grumpy is okay as long as I don’t forget to recognize life’s ever present promising beauty. Even on those miserable days when the global news is unbearable.

The judge ordered three members of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot to serve two years in a labour camp for “blasphemous hooliganism”. This, because they had staged a peaceful — what I would call artistic — protest against Russian leader Vladimir Putin inside an Orthodox church.

Alisa Obraztsova, a member of Pussy Riot’s legal defense team, stated that the trial was a “political put-up job”.

In my view, it was bigger than that: it was a patriarchal anti-feminist forced blow-job where religion was used to choke off feminist dissent and shove down their throats a world view that refuses to accept anything other than male domination.

The judge wouldn’t even allow into the court record a definition of what feminism is; instead, preferring to detail how “the women’s skirts rode up as they kicked their legs and how they crossed into an area of the church forbidden to women”.

Let’s forget that these three women were wearing colorful leggings that completely covered their legs. The accusations against these women are the same repulsive tactics used in rape cases where the victim becomes the accused.

An artist’s role is to get people to look deeply at the “unexamined assumptions” of their religious, cultural, economic, political and environmental belief systems. I attempt this through studio sculpture, site-specific land art, educational tours at Windgrove and the production of this blog “Life on the Edge”.

Perhaps my writing comes across a little too crude or raw to some people. All I can say is that we’re all in rough waters now and if — after several drafts of words carefully chosen — the language used shocks some people, I only ask that you try to understand where your shock comes from; perhaps, even use it as a door to a greater awareness.

For me, the most shocking and informative words I have ever read — two short sentences that brought a crystal clear clarity — were these that I came across in Jay Griffith’s book ‘Wild’:

“Not Enough Cunt. That’s the Problem with Genesis.”