This work addresses the trauma of sexual abuse.
For me, this drawing was especially challenging to develop because it oscillates between compositional beauty and real-life tragedy, in its attempt to capture the horror of sexual abuse.
The main subject—a beautiful black girl with her hands attempting to conceal her face—first showed up as a quick sketch in my drawing Selfie Girl (she is no longer visible in that image), and at that time, I immediately identified her as the embodiment of shame. I also realized that she required her own stand-alone drawing.
With the first set of idea sketches, I tried to build upon the “face covering” design that I had originally imagined.
In this work, I felt that concealing the girl’s face—whether by her own hands, or those of another—would be an important aspect of discussing the shame that she wears, and also showing her diminishing sense of self-worth.
As usual in my sketches, the main idea (in this case, shame) is emphasized with excessive figures/limbs—multiple arms and hands appear in the act of covering her face.
I also considered the idea of dealing with the trauma of sexual abuse by erasing portions of the girl’s face.
I had to decide which compositional direction to embrace—concealment or erasure—as they each potentially communicate a unique set of philosophical ideas concerning identity and personhood.
My idea eventually evolved into a motif that included moths. Moths often symbolize the cover of night, when all things go quiet, and new dangerous secrets are sometimes formed. The moth is also a creature that is attracted to light—any type of light—sometimes to the point of its own demise.
I thought that perhaps I could better tell the story of this girl with a design that incorporated symbols. I wanted the moths to be larger than life, to speak to the gravity of the issue—sexual abuse—and the heaviness of the resulting trauma.
I was not immediately sure how to incorporate the large moths into the composition.
I had a number of interesting ideas, including one which positioned a prominent moth resting directly on the face of the girl—in this case, posing both as a symbol of the trauma of the night, and as a symbol for shame, because it conceals her face.
In the end, I split the difference—quite literally. The final drawing features the girl appearing in two instances on either side of the canvas—in one appearance, as shame, in the other as totally overtaken by darkness.
As with the other drawings in this series, the darkness is formed by an India ink wash on the canvas. Moths decorate the entire picture plane, both in the light and dark areas of the composition.
Sexual abuse is not just a black girl problem, obviously. However, my interest in it as a subject for one of the ten drawings in this series comes as a result of the degrees of marginalization to which black girls are often subjected.
If the powerless and the voiceless are the ones who suffer most from sexual exploitation, then I am left wondering, constantly, about the untold histories of this particular type of atrocity against black girls (and boys) and the damages that have come as a result.
