In her book Red Moon, Miranda Gray explains how in the Middle Ages, menstruating during the new moon was considered "normal", equivalent to the white moon cycle and was related to fertile, healthy, motherly women, while menstruating during the full moon (red moon cycle), was often attributed to "witches," introverted women.
These moons are a series of spheres made of frozen seawater and made with frozen menstrual blood mixed with tap water. They convey a discourse that reflects on cyclicity, those that occur within the human body and those that occur on a planetary level, and understands their interrelationship through the material of water, which freezes, dissolves, flows through animal, plant, river and sea bodies, bodies of water inevitably united and impossibly isolated from each other. The series consists of two simultaneous movements, which represent an exercise in undoing the human/"nature" dichotomy: the return of menstrual blood to non-urban spaces, and the return of seawater to urban spaces.
The piece is an attempt at materialising the interconnectedness that Astrida Neimanis's describes in her research and her book Bodies of Water, while uncovering ancient forms of women-associated knowledge and reverting their stereotypical origin (white moon - mother / red moon - witch) to understand water and body cycles as a deeply complex and ever-changing process.
Salt is the material boundary between sand and water. As a mineral, it exists as a rock, but it also inhabits seawater. For centuries, salt has also been a symbol of wealth, existing in and between human life, its food and its markets. Like seawater, it is part of the human body, and sits at the origin of life on Earth. The solidness and rigidity associated with the "land", where human civilization is sustained, though, is often understood in opposition to water and the Ocean, which we observe as remote, alien places.
A line of salt tries to delimit the edge of the sea, which evidences itself as pointless, as the water sweeps it away. This process of dissolution is evidenced as the only answer to the question of where the sea ends: the sea does not end, but fluctuates, evaporates, precipitates, it waters, it gives birth. The attempt to delimit it ends in uncertainty and impossibility.
Can we immobilise a ubiquitous movement? Can we define immensity? Can we understand, with our language, the ineffable?
The dichotomy between earth and water, solid and liquid, dissolves in the same way that salt dissolves in water, evidencing the fragility of the binarism that sustains Western thought and its incapacity to grasp the complexity of interrelations between Ocean and land, human and nonhuman.