At the Slade, Elwes continued to create a series
of powerful works on the themes from female experience. In Menstruation I
(1979) the artist dressed in white and sat atop a circular sheet upon
which she bled, drew and wrote.
In Menstruation II (also 1979)
Elwes used the same principle, this time enclosing herself in a small
makeshift room, with a glass partition between the artist and the audience
of daily passersby at the school. Onlookers would write questions on
pieces of paper, which Elwes transcribed, along with her answers, onto the
glass partition. The piece ended when the glass was entirely covered in
writing.
Elwes' point in this work was that menstruation was not an extreme
condition, but a banal event in the lives of every woman. The context of
these performances was a widespread radical feminist attempt to retrieve
menstruation as a source of creative energy lost to the patriarchal order
and contemporary taboos. Many women artists (for example, Carolee
Schneemann, Judy Clark and Judith Higginbottom) were trying to reclaim
menstruation from its negative image. These early performances can be seen
as predecessors to Elwes' later work in that the body - hers and others -
would become primary visual material.
