– Written and researched by Stella Schröter –
Lucy Bink’s words hang in the air as we sit across from each other in a lively bar in the center of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). I reached out to her weeks ago to listen to her experience as a feminist artist and photographer creating art about menstruation, a natural process that modern Western societies have wrapped in shame and silence.
From stigma to canvas
Through photography, painting, drawing, writing, audio stories and informed by scientific research, Bink explores themes of menstruation, hysteria, and body politics in visual culture. Her work Luteal, which I first encountered at The Grey Space in the Middle in The Hague, represents a raw creative journey into the shame, anger, and stigma surrounding menstruation.
Bink’s artistic interest in menstruation began with a personal health crisis. After stopping birth control, she experienced intense anxiety, irregular cycles, and cystic acne. The confusion and shame she felt about her changing body became the catalyst for her art.
‘I was very confused about what was happening to my body, and I think also this internalised stigma, this shame, it was very weird, like completely uncomfortable,’ she tells me, sipping her coffee. ‘On the other hand, I felt like I was kind of leaning into this irrational crazy female trope and it was really hard.’
Legacies of menstrual art
Rather than suppress these feelings, Bink chose to channel them into her art. She began talking to friends about their menstrual experiences and translating these conversations into creative work. ‘The purpose for me was to be fully irrational about it, to expose the frustration and aggression and just lay it out on the table and to be as primal as I can.’
Bink’s work joins a long tradition of artists who have refused to hide their periods. The oldest known depiction of a menstruating body, found in a temple in Göbekli Tepe, Turkey, dates back 12,000 years. In 1965, Japanese artist Shigeko Kubota performed Vagina Painting in New York, using a paintbrush attached to her vagina to create red lines on a white surface. American feminist artist Judy Chicago created Red Flag in 1971, a photolithograph showing a tampon being removed from a vagina. These artists, and countless others, some of whose work has been lost or forgotten, understood what Bink articulates today; that menstruation is about far more than biology. It’s about power, shame, and the right to occupy space.
Creative cycles
As our conversation shifts from coffee to beer and the bar fills with evening crowds, Bink’s anger about menstrual shame resonates with my own. This shared frustration led me to seek out other artists working in this space, including Ella Suzanne, an interactive media artist exploring the intersection of technology and bodily rhythms. Meeting Suzanne in a sun-drenched garden cafe, I learned about her installation Periodically True, which represents her body through sensitive and tactile materials. The sculpture, constructed from metal, latex, and pantyhose sewn together with red thread, incorporates her own menstrual cycle’s average length alongside calendars showing different cyclical rhythms.
‘I was inspired by the bridging between our understanding of human physiology and nature,’ Suzanne explains. ‘That’s kind of how I fell in love with it and realised: oh wait, there’s such a cyclical act in the menstrual cycle, and it’s reflected so much around us too.’ Through her creative processes, by collecting her own blood, connecting and trying to understand her own bodily rhythms and by creating an installation she wanted to mirror the cyclical nature of menstruation. In her installation, as she says she created an ‘organic being’ representative and parallel to the menstrual cycle and nature’s seasons.
Confronting shame
Even artists challenging menstrual stigma struggle with internalised shame. Suzanne collected her own menstrual blood in a mason jar, storing it in her fridge for her installation, a process that brought up uncomfortable questions. ‘Wait, but what am I actually doing or why am I collecting this blood, why am I walking around with a mason jar?’, she wondered. ‘I did catch myself sometimes, wondering if this was worth occupying space for.’ But the act of creating, making paper from her own blood and writing a manifesto on it, transformed her relationship with her body. ‘It created such a different relationship to the blood itself and made me just kind of realise how mesmerised I am by the thing a lot more now.’
Art as resistance
Both Lucy Bink and Ella Suzanne demonstrate how art can crack open the harsh, stigmatising narratives many of us have internalised about menstruation. Their work doesn’t just challenge stigma, it offers new ways of understanding and relating to our bodies. As Bink told me that evening in Amsterdam, anger can be a manifestation of power. Their work doesn’t just resist stigma, it reimagines what’s possible when shame is replaced with curiosity. So paint with your period blood. Photograph your experience. Write poetry about your cycle. Collect, create, and claim space. Because menstruation is so much more than biological, painful, or reproductive. It’s a source of creative power. It is art.
See more work from the artists:
Lucy Bink, or on Instagram.
Ella Suzanne, or on Instagram.
About the author: Stella Schröter (she/her) is an aspiring de-colonial intersectional feminist, artist and menstrual activist. For her master thesis, she delved into The Art of Menstrual Resistance: The Experience of Menstrual Artists in Amsterdam and Beyond! This thesis, a quest to understanding how menstrual artists experience creating menstrual art, is the result of six conversations with different menstrual artists near Amsterdam and explores the possibilities of re-imagining menstruation ‘otherwise’. The quotes included in this article are taken from conversations Schröter had during the journey of writing her thesis.
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