Introduction: There is Room For Him on My Shelf or Hidden Figures

There is Room for Him on My Shelf
An artistic reimagining of power structures and justice served

I’m anxious

Your silence will not protect you

The audiences’ consent to the macabre
The myth of radical shock
What if work reproduces the violence rather than rectifying it*

The only truly macabre is
the injustice the victims experience,
this work is simply true
Rhetorically it says –
XY raped XX

not “XX was raped”

It won´t stop vile people doing vile things.
Rather making lives survived seen

I´m still scared.
The Masters tools will never tear down the masters’ house

And it is never without fear; of visibility,
of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps of judgment,
of pain,
of death.
But we have lived through all of those already,
in silence, except death.
And I remind myself all the time now,
that if I was to have been born mute
or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long
for safety,
I would still have suffered,
and I would still die.
It is very good for establishing perspective
(Audrey Lorde, 1980)

Is Medusa a monster?

Medusa is me

The masters live
By the grace of my decapitated head

No more

“There is room for him on my shelf “(working title) is a vigilante work exploring female rage, protesting the continued silence on rape, it is a breaking free of the banishment and shame thrust upon us. The project takes shape through sculpting, drawing, printing and inviting. Whenever I feel my anger directed outward, I calmly meet my own gaze, as a figurine of Rind. In my mind’s eye we sit in a dark room on our bed in front of our shelf of justice. The shelf brimming with glass jars filled with liquid distorting the severed penises and balls of my rapists. My words, like the artworks, might be laced with Medusas power to petrify the audience.

I turn your face around! It is my face.
That frozen rage is what I must explore—
Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!
This is the gift I thank Medusa for.

May Sarton, Medusa the Muse (1971)

*“Epilog/Forvent meg”, 2022, Othelie Farstad. Plexi dry point monotype, a few years before I knew the shelf would be filled with dicks.*

I´ve started sketching and drawing to bring this image of calm, grotesque, beautiful anger to life. The work is only in the early cradle of exploration through sketches. The project (as so many of mine do) keeps growing as problems arise; the ideas grow bigger. To be able to create my drawing I needed to make the still life models to figure out the technicalities of how light, water, glass and object behave visually. Therefore, I´ve tested several different materials to sculpt with and submerged them in water to find combination(s) that won’t disintegrate. I´ve landed on poured silicone, and I´m still learning this process.

As I´m exploring this part, I´ve found the process to be powerful, and I now see no reason why my models should only serve as still life or why it should only be my opportunity for poetic justice. Thus, they will be served as an installation of shelves with chopped containing the dicks, balls, hands and tongues of rapists. They are modeled in silicone, plasticine, or wool, by anyone who feel inclined to accept my invitation to add their stories to this manifestation of hidden figures.

Once I´ve figured it out, I want to host workshops. When it´s all ready for a show, the shelves will create a space to sit down, anyone in need of poetic justice is invited to create and imprison their own dick and balls to add to the shelves of hidden figures. Let heads roll, as they say.