Blood Feather


Blood Feather explores the body’s vulnerability through sculpture, painting, and flowing water. Copper pipes, suspended chains, wax, and stone bring systems of circulation and containment into tension, tracing the fragile relationship between growth, pressure, and rupture.


Installation concept





Blood Feather of a Northern Flicker2016 - 
Blue wax, copper elements (plates, pipes, wire), drywall, nails, roller-chain, steel I-beam, oil and textile on canvas, feather, alabaster, radiator

Blood Feather marks an earlier iteration of this inquiry, where the body first appeared as a site of vulnerability, transformation, and exposure - shifting the focus from flow to force. 

Where Bodies of Water traces the movement of water—from mountain runoff to river to sea—this body of work turns toward the moment where water is held, compressed, and resisted. The imagery draws from the architecture of dams: repeated vertical structures that regulate and restrain a force that is otherwise fluid, expansive, and uncontrollable. These painted columns, at once minimal and monumental, operate as both landscape and interior—structures that echo systems of containment, both environmental and psychological.

The title suggests a moment of rupture within the body—a “blood feather” being one that is still alive, still in formation, and therefore vulnerable. It points to a state of becoming under pressure. Within this context, water is not only environmental but bodily: a force that circulates, sustains, and, under certain conditions, destabilizes.




In 2016, my body began to deteriorate due to heavy metal toxicity. Basic functions—walking, breathing, reading—became increasingly difficult, as if my body were turning against itself. During this time, I found a northern flicker in the street, unable to fly. I brought it to a rescue center, where it died days later. The bird became a reflection of my own physical state—a body in collapse.

A feather left behind, still filled with blood in its shaft, became a central image: a form interrupted mid-growth. This moment informed the work’s material language. Architectural elements—pipes, wires, beams—are treated as extensions of the body, systems that carry energy but can also become sites of contamination. 

The sculptures are assembled from discarded materials: corroded copper pipes, alabaster remnants, and twisted steel structures. Bound together with roller-chain or wire, they hold tension between fragility and force. Like the body, these materials resist, bend, and sometimes fail. Through this process, the work proposes rebuilding not as restoration, but as transformation—where the ruin becomes the structure for something new.
I examine the body as an architectural system—one that can break down, become contaminated, and be rebuilt.

 Rooted in a personal experience of heavy metal toxicity, the work traces parallels between biological and infrastructural networks: veins and pipes, blood and water, contamination and flow.

Composed of salvaged industrial materials—copper pipes, steel beams, roller-chain, and architectural fragments—the sculptures reassemble systems of failure into new structural forms. The project positions collapse not as an end state, but as the condition from which transformation begins.







                          

                  
 
Detail







Detail



       











       







Northern Flicker, found injured en route to the studio; a reflection of my own physical state.

Northern Flicker, 125th Street and Broadway, New York
Digital photograph
2016
       

       



Contact
© Jenna Basso Pietrobon
France — Italy