Ellen Lesperance
‘For the mixed-media print Who Killed Karen Silkwood? Lesperance utilised some of the same matrices she deployed for Life (2020) but created a pared-down version whose muted grey colours provide the perfect foil for the printed woollen scarf folded across its surface and the pink hand-knit nipple pin fastened on its right side. The nipple, with its puckered fibres and evidently hand-wrought texture, highlights the surprisingly tactile nature of lithography, which historically has involved a bodily encounter with ink, paper and stone. Drawing from the source imagery of a photograph from c. 1983–1985 in which a group of protestors, clad entirely in mourning black, demand accountability for the death of US laboratory technician, union leader, and nuclear safety activist Karen Silkwood, Lesperance has honed in on a detail that might otherwise go overlooked, which is the nipple attached to the central figure’s pants. This somewhat odd accessory distinctly genders the protest and underscores the stakes of Silkwood’s death: it declares that radioactive pollution, industrial contamination, and environmental despoliation are inextricably feminist concerns, and that Silkwood, as a mother, might have been especially concerned about these issues. The extraneous, detached nipple also functions—probably unintentionally—as a moment of almost surrealist or ghoulish humor within a scene otherwise marked by its almost oppressive seriousness.’
—Julia Bryan-Wilson
Ellen Lesperance
Who Killed Karen Silkwood?, 2020–2021
Three-colour lithograph with chine collé and hand-knitted element on tan Rives BFK, Mulberry and Thai Kozo, signed on the verso
108.9 x 74.6 cm
AP 1 of 2 + 15 Editions
$3,500 (excl. VAT and shipping)
