Luzene's Knots: Artist tackles sexual assault art at Eiteljorg museum

The woman doesn’t say why she lies in the center of the room, her body contorted, 3,000 crimson knots spilling out from her like a puddle. She doesn’t say why, when she stands, she leaves behind a silhouette that resembles an outline at a crime scene. She doesn’t say why she will spend six hours a day for the next 10 days taking each knot and hanging it on the wall — meticulously, one by one by one — or why, at the end, they take the shape of a giant red ring.

Luzene Hill is a quiet woman, but you can sense she has something to say. You feel it in her ballerina steps, in the way she ponders one knot to the next. On the surface, the knots, handmade and dyed in the khipu style of the Incans, are an aesthetic marvel. They remind us that much of what we perceive are intricate details that our eyes and brains composite into a larger picture.

But read the artist statement nearby and you discover the real reason all this is here — that this is an installation about rape, and the 3,870 khipus represent the number of sexual assaults that go unreported each day in the United States.

Hill doesn’t say that this story, the story of rape, is also a story about her. That the knots and the crime scene-style outline and the red ring that forms around the gallery walls harken back to a cold, dim morning in 1994, when she decided to take a jog in the park.

She was silenced that morning, and remained silent for years until, despite her best efforts, the truth came seeping out of her through her drawings. Now, with “Retracing the Trace,” on display at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art through Feb. 28, she has offered an outpouring of truth in the shape of art — and a piece of herself — that’s infuriatingly universal and daringly personal, beautifully symbolic and heartbreakingly literal.



***

On an early January morning in 1994, Hill went on a jog through Piedmont Park in Atlanta. It was still dark. The weather was cold, so she wore a jacket with a hoodie pulled around her face, the strings tied snugly against her neck.

As she ran down a path overlooking the lake, a man jogged up behind her. She heard him approach her, but she figured he was also out for exercise. He was not.

The man yanked her hoodie, pulling her backward and onto the ground. Strangling her with the cord of the hoodie, he dragged her off the pavement and onto a muddy bank under a tree. He pressed his thumbs into her neck. There, by the lake, as she twisted and fought in the snow-covered leaves, the man battered her face and raped her.

His face was covered, but during the attack she could see his eyes.

Eyes she will never forget.

Hill spent most of the next day talking to the police. They told her they searched the perimeter of the lake and found no evidence. Frustrated and still in shock, she returned to the park. Under that same tree, she found not only the bright pink hat she was wearing but also her blood (“There was so much more than I expected,” she says), his knife and, there in the ground, the imprint of 47-year-old woman — her imprint. “It was easy to see where he had dragged me, and where we had struggled,” she says.

The assault left many marks. The one everyone could see lasted for six months. It was where she was strangled with the string of her jacket, a thin red line burning across her neck like a hot brand. Every morning for half a year, whenever she looked into the mirror, she was reminded of what it felt like — the cord pulled so tight against her neck she couldn’t breathe, or scream.

***

Someone is sexually assaulted about every two minutes in the U.S. A vast majority of incidents, roughly four out of five, go unreported, and rapes that are reported rarely end in prosecution. A study by the Department of Justice estimated that, for every 100 rapists, only two will ever spend a day in prison.

Recent times have seen unprecedented media attention on sexual assault in university campuses. Nearly 100 universities face Title IX federal sexual violence investigations. Last year, a Yale fraternity was banned after pledges were caught chanting, “Yes means no, no means anal.” The incident was one of many to make national headlines in the past two years.

“We live in a time that necessitates the phrase ‘rape culture,’ ” the writer and Purdue University professor Roxane Gay wrote in an essay titled “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence.” “This phrase denotes a culture where we are inundated, in different ways, by the idea that male aggression and violence toward women is acceptable and often inevitable.”

In September 2014, Emma Sulkowicz, an art student at Columbia University, began carrying a 50-pound mattress wherever she went, saying she would not stop doing so until a student she claimed raped her was expelled. The art critic Jerry Saltz called the piece of performance art, titled “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight),” one of the best art shows of 2014. Writer Emily Bazelon said the work, and the heated discussions surrounding it, was “an increasingly bitter fight over truth and narrative.”

Hill, who began drawing seriously in 1996, always separated her personal life from her work. The assault, after all, was something she was “processing” in her own time, privately, through therapy sessions that included primal screaming and other uses of her body. When an art instructor noted that her abstract figures appeared to speak to the “vulnerability of women,” she stowed those drawings away.

“I didn’t show them at all. I said, wait a minute, this is my personal, private thing,” Hill says. “I don’t want ‘victim art.’ I’m a survivor. I’m not going to carry this around. I’m not going to let it define me.”

In 2009, after seeing “Ruined,” Lynn Nottage’s play about women in Democratic Republic of Congo, Hill decided to create her first piece of installation art tackling the issue of rape. The piece, “… the body and blood,” featured a flurry of rose pedals. Every two minutes, Hill rang an altar bell and added one pedal to a basket, symbolizing how often a reported rape occurs in the U.S., until the basket, the table that held it and the floor underneath was overflowing with pedals.

“Numbers just don’t mean that much to people,” Hill says. “The idea is that if I can present large volumes of an object or material, you realize how much that is, more than just writing a number.”

With that piece, Hill showed she could make art that tackled important social issues. She was a fully formed female Cherokee artist with a platform to give voice to the voiceless. And yet there was still that part of her she had not accessed through art. There was still that moment in 1994.

***

Inspiration came, but it came wrapped in trauma. Decades after the day she’ll never forget, Hill saw the Cuban performance artist Ana Mendieta’s famous “Siluetas” photographs, which depicted human figures pressed into the earth. Then 1994 came rushing back — the imprint of her struggling body in the mud and leaves, under the tree near the bank of a lake, her own “Silueta.”

“As with the greatest art, I responded to Ana’s art in a visceral, personal way,” Hill says. “It brought me back to the struggle on the bank. It made me think, 'How can I make some kind of image within a gallery of the struggle? How can I bring that into my own art?' ”

Hill wasn’t sure how far she could go, how deep she could dive into her past. She started experimenting. She covered herself in paint and writhed on a piece of canvas, in the vein of the French post-war artist Yves Klein’s body prints. She dipped cords in red ink and pressed it against her neck, then pressed paper onto her neck to make prints. But the red ring left on her neck was too much to bear.

“Every time I did that, I’d see those streaks, which was exactly what I had seen in the mirror for six months,” she says. “I started feeling stressed, started having flashbacks.”

“Retracing the Trace” emerged out of Hill’s desire to sensitively, abstractly portray three images symbolizing her rape — the imprint, the cord and the red ring around her neck. During the piece's installation, Hill lies in the center of the gallery, arms and legs bent, while 3,870 Incan knots are poured over her. She rises, leaving behind the shape of her body. Then she spends 60 hours pinning each knot to the wall, eventually forming a red ring on the four walls.

Hill saw how sexual assault, in our culture, can become shrouded in silence and anonymity. And so her piece is about giving voice to the thousands of women who don't tell anyone about being raped, who bear the weight of their assault in private. As the knots are hung up on the wall, they are touched and seen and accounted for. "It's the gradual removing of a violent trace, into a reckoning," she says.

Sometimes this breaks her heart, because in the unique patterns of the khipus she imagines stories much like her own, but untold. She thinks to herself, how many others are out there, bearing this truth I bore for twenty years and continue to hold within me?

"Retracing the Trace" became a way to give voice to rape survivors in more than one way. Hill will never forget opening the guest book when she installed the piece in Georgia. It was filled with comments, hundreds of them, from those who have been sexually assaulted — little, one-sentence confessionals to Hill, who through her art had gained their trust. "One of these cords is for me," one person wrote.

"It's a message for the women who don't report," says Hill. "You think nobody knows how you feel. But you're not alone. You don't have to do anything, except take care of yourself." And the message to everyone else: "Wake up. Silence gives consent. I want the public to know that this is happening. This is happening two blocks from here, right now."

Call Star reporter Wei-Huan Chen at (317) 444-6249. Follow him on Twitter: @weihuanchen .

About the exhibit

“Retracing the Trace” is part of the 2015 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, which awards $25,000 each to five Native American artists and invites them to show their work in a group exhibition. The 2015 Fellows are Luzene Hill, Brenda Mallory, Da-ka-xeen Mehner, Holly Wilson and Mario Martinez.

The exhibit is on display through Feb. 28 at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 500 W. Washington St.; (317) 636-9378; eiteljorg.org.