interlocked.
The work of Kathryn Douglas Schien,
a community and social practice artist.
This is a body of work which traverses the intersections of community and empowerment, as well as neglect and violence. Much of the content addresses sexual assault and domestic violence.
please proceed with care.
domestic violence &
communal storytelling
In 2012, I began a series of works through partnerships with domestic violence organizations. Our goals in these projects were to raise awareness of the prevalence of violence in our communities, to build a larger network of allies against violence, and to extend our resources deeper into the communities.
These goals required specific strategies to address the societal stigma of shame and to provide awareness without triggering additional trauma. Many of the following projects are designed in response to these challenges.
Share your story
One of the most powerful components of supporting survivors of violence is ensuring that these women are heard. Storytelling is an incredibly powerful and often cathartic experience for any survivor of violence. However, many women don't feel comfortable sharing their story because of shame or fear. This project uses touch-sensitive paint to allow anyone to share their story safely and anonymously with the viewer. Women record their stories, which are transferred onto a special circuit board attached to the paint. Viewers are able to press their hand to the woman’s handprint, and hear her story, in her own voice.
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A study of domestic violence in missouri
In 2012, when I first began researching domestic violence in Missouri, I turned to the State Highway Patrol as the agency that collates all the information about violence in the state and publishes annual reports. I was surprised to find very limited information concerning domestic violence; the main report available was about the recidivistic rates of criminals charged with intimate partner abuse. The opening line of the 2011 report read,
"The characteristics of domestic violence and domestic violence offenders in Missouri are understudied. To date there have been no published studies on this topic in Missouri despite the fact that 11 percent of all homicides in 2008 were domestic violence related."
This was the only the first of many encounters which demonstrated the sheer lack of information and lack of police attention focused on this type of violence.
Initially, these discoveries enraged me. I found the lack of data and concern atrocious. The police and the media treated these murders as isolated events without addressing any larger systemic issue of violence against women. The first work I made in response to this research was "A Study of Domestic Violence in Missouri". For this work, I investigated any reported homicides with female victims and male aggressors in 2012 in Missouri, then memorialized each date of murder on a secondhand cross-stitch collected from across the region. They function as a common domestic art form which hangs in many homes in the rural Midwest. The installation of the modified cross-stitches are accompanied by a cross-stitched QR code, which when scanned by a smartphone, takes the viewer to a victim advocacy website. Together, these twenty-eight cross-stitches act as both a domestically themed, empathetic memorial and as a legitimate data set concerning intimate partner violence.
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The yarn campaign
In October of 2013 I launched a multi-city yarn-bombing campaign with two local advocacy groups (RACS & CARD-V), in recognition of Domestic Violence Awareness Month. We partnered with businesses, municipal courts, parks, libraries, & Lincoln University to install twelve purple and teal yarn bombs. (Purple and teal are the colors for domestic violence and sexual assault awareness) These colorful installations also included cross-stitched QR codes which could be scanned by smartphones to connect to the CARD-V and RACS websites.
The NCMEC
During my research, one of the first stories of violence I encountered was about a young Jane Doe found in a St. Louis basement in the eighties. She was savagely murdered, raped, and decapitated at about 10 years of age. Neither the St. Louis community nor myself could understand how this little girl was left unidentified in this basement. She was someone’s daughter, granddaughter, friend, student, and neighbor. How could no one be searching for her? Decades later, she remains unidentified.
Jane’s story led me to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), one of the governmental databases where I continued my research about St. Louis Jane Doe. While exploring their database, I discovered over one hundred Jane Does from all over the United States, all possibly under the age of 18. The bodies of these girls have been found for years all over the United States, and no one has claimed them or been looking for them. Due to decomposition or the severity of assault, their faces were not photographable. In most instances these women have been given composite identities based on their bone structure. Some have had pictures drawn simply based on their height or likely hair color. Occasionally they are only represented by their clothing, a specific ring, or a type of sandal. Every one of them has been discarded. Every one of them has been lost.
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Additional Projects
Violence in our community is a complex issue. It is interlocked with our government agencies, educational systems, healthcare, social institutions, media—every layer of our lives. To combat this requires a variety of strategies. The following images are additional projects, some of which tackle issues concerning interpersonal violence, but also cover broader topics, such as community identity.
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Gravois park,
an education
It is hard for me to reconcile depictions of St. Louis with the city I love. Our communities are so much more complex and diverse than portrayed by the media or statistical analysis. While I have been making work about violence in Missouri for many years, Pentimento (a site-specific show in the Gravois Park area) was an opportunity to narrow my vision in order to better understand the complexity of a single neighborhood.
Gravois Park is a wonderful representation of the St. Louis Metro area. At first glance, you may only notice the violence and vacancy, but it is a community fighting for its future. This installation brought together a broad history of the city juxtaposed with the intimate voices of its residents who are committed to the success and rejuvenation of their community.
