Body Prints, Memory Bleeds
By Glen Daly
“And one day the letter came out. I sat down and frantically wrote it…and the tears would come down and I would brush them off and write some more.”
A woman enters a dimly-lit room. She is tall, lithe, with shoulder-length, auburn hair and blue eyes. She locks the door behind her, looks about the room, checking dark corners, hiding places. She unbuttons and removes her blouse, then unzips her jeans and lets them drop to her ankles – she is not wearing underwear. She reaches into her bag, removes a large jar of Vaseline and rubs its contents over her torso. Then, she lays down on a large stone, arching her back. She rocks back and forth, then rises and dons her clothes quickly.
Pamela Underwood in ‘Dear Granddaddy’
Photographs from videotape by Dave Allen
What Pamela Underwood was doing, what she did at SDSU for a year or so, was a means of regaining control of her body. Pamela is an artist – paint, mixed media – who has a B.F.A. in lithography. SDSU is one of the few places in San Diego where she could find a stone large enough for her “Body Prints,” a series of nine lithographic works she completed three years ago.
These efforts at regaining control of her body were the result of an all-too-common childhood trauma: Pamela had been molested from infancy until age 12, by her grandfather. Her “Body Prints” were a form of subconscious therapy. Another therapeutic work is called,”Dear Grandaddy,” a letter Pamela wrote to her grandfather and later developed into a performance piece at Karen Finley’s workshop at SDSU three years ago.
Pamela wears dried chili pepper earrings, an earth-toned skirt, and no makeup. She sits crosslegged on the plank floor of her studio, a rustic outbuilding 20 yards from the house that she and her husband own n the shadow of Mt.Woodson. The harsh chemical smell of paint and solvents mingles with a blend of sage and the sweetness of the flowering loquat tree just outside -the screen door. Manzanita, eucalyptus, and citrus trees share the hillside with cats, one peacock, numerous rattlesnakes, and a small fleet of Toyota-sized boulders. “It’s all about healing,” says Pamela. “Sexual abuse, incest, occurs usually at the earliest most formative ages. Because the damage done is so often repressed and hidden so deeply, it takes time recover. Sometimes it takes a lifetime.”
When did you first come to grips with your molestation?
“I always knew it – I never buried it,” she says. “The reason I am healthy and the reason I didn’t bury it is because I am a very open person. I was about 12 when I realized I didn’t have to let granddaddy manipulate me, anymore – my big sister and my cousins and I had a slumber party and we found out that, yes, this was happening to all of us @ he did it to many of his granddaughters. So it made us stronger safety in numbers. We could talk about it and try to protect our little sisters. I can remember having a sleepover with a girl in elementary school – it was grade or maybe and we shared our stories. Only I thought I was so lucky – luchky, lucky girl – because her molester was her father and he could come into her room every night and do whatever he wanted.” (continued)
Did any of this influence your art?
“For a long time I didn’t think so. I used to have a model come to my studio every Friday. Over time she became a friend and took interest in my work and began to give me feedback – which was counterproductive – and I wasn’t getting anything done. So, I decided that I’d be my own model. I wanted to do figurative work – I draw figures beautifully – but I decided to approach it differently, to do prints of my own body.
“When the prints are finished, they don’t come across as nudes, they come across as figures, as strong statements of females and I love that part.” Pamela holds up a rectangular print the size of a throw rug: “This is what prints- the shoulders, the collar bone – which is a beautiful, graceful part of the body – then the breasts, then the skinny rib cage, and then it comes down almost like a vessel,” she gestures towards her hips, “and every fat line and every hair follicle and every fold in the stomach – it’s just beautiful. I learned to love my body.
“When you print your body it doesn’t look the way it does in the mirror. It made me get in touch with myself and it made me feel good to do what I wanted with my body in a positive way, you know, not doing it because someone else wanted me to, not being an exhibitionist, but being in control.
“I started doing body prints in ’89, And as I did more and more I didn’t think, ‘Why is this interesting? Why do I want to keep doing this?’ I don’t normally analyze my work. My last body print was the fetal position and when I looked at it, I saw it as a symbol of trauma in being sick, emotionally, and I realized that there was something that I wanted to do in my art to help me deal with this life experience.
“Whenever I would paint, this stuff [about the molestation] would come up with me and I would release it – put it down on, paper. This went on fog three years. It would keep coming up, and I would dump it on this piece of paper, and then I would go back to work. I usually listen to music when I paint and sometimes I would just dance wildly; I never had this feeling before. It happened when I remembered feelings about my grandfather. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, I just did it…. got it out by bits and pieces.
“And then one day the letter came out, the ‘Dear Granddaddy’ letter. It came out all at once, and I sat down and frantically wrote it and I would cry and the tears would come down and I would brush them off and write some more. It was like,” she pauses, searching for a word, “automatic writing, I couldn’t write it fast enough. The words were scribbled because everything was coming so fast.”
It was then that Pamela decided to take the performance workshop at SDSU. Karen Finley, one of Jesse Helms’ “NEA Four,’ was the instructor. ‘Karen Finley is the performance artist who smears food all over her body. It’s very symbolic; sometimes she’s naked. My view of my art changed after spending a week with her because she was so nurturing and encouraging – totally unlike her performance.”
Months later, the installation for Pamela’s NEA- funded “Avant Guard Dogs” at Sushi Gallery, Pamela ran into James Barker) who had taken the same workshop with Pamela and had been moved by pamela’s performance. Barker, then a member of Sushi’s board, and Lynn Schuette, Sushi’s director, approached Pamela and invited her to, perform “Dear Granddaddy”.
” I didn’t go looking for a place to perform this. It all opened up, and it scared me to death. I only had a five-minute performance [from Karen Finley’s workshop], and Lynn Schuette wanted it expanded to 30 minutes. “Then I remembered all these bits and pieces of paper that I had in my studio, are I thought, ‘Well, I could put them together and try to make them cohesive and make sense out of them.” She claps her hands together. “And that’s what I did. I figured, if Karen Finley could do this, shove Yams up her ass on stage, I could do my performance.”
In December 1991, Pamela performed the expanded “Dear Granddaddy” as part of three evenings with James Barker entitled “Life is a Delicate Thing.” After seeing the piece, Hope Shaw of San Diego City College invited Pamela to the City College television studio where they shot her performance in a television format. Since then she has had other offers to perform “Dear Granddaddy,” but they haven’t panned out yet.
“To me, what’s most important about my performance is to let people know that it’s possible to put themselves in a safe, creative space where they can face these issues and begin to heal at their own pace. I’ve never g one to therapy for this, but I’ve always done art, and I realize that through my art I’m put into a meditative state where I become open, and vulnerable.
“At the end of each performance, I handed out a healing resource sheet that contained the names of facilitators and hot-line numbers in case the performance brought up similar issues for people in the audience. I didn’t want to leave people cold.”
Asked about reactions to her performance’ she says, “It’s such a personal thing. People can feel that I’m being sincere. People have come up to me and said, ‘I’ve never told anybody this, but this is what happened to me, and having you say it gives me the courage to tell you.’ They might not be able to tell anybody else for a year or two or three. Then they might find the courage to tell it to a hot-line person or a facilitator. But every step in healing is hard. You finally take a step and then you sometimes rest a little bit before you have to take that next hard step.”
About the years of molestation, Pamela says, “It was a constant thing that we lived with when we were around him, and it was a control over us that he had. It was the sneaking and the lying and the being very angry with us if we didn’t cooperate. It was part of our upbringing that we would respect our elders. So it was drummed into us to respect that man and to do what that man said. And the way I am raising my kids is different, because I don’t really want them to respect everybody and do what everybody says and trust everybody.
“I am glad that I couldn’t repress it. I feel sorry for women who are dredging this shit up. They’re trying to remember it – they throw up when they make love, they have nightmares, insomnia, diarrhea – they know that there’s something there. I’m grateful that mine never went ‘away. I wasn’t always grateful, but I learned how to change it into something positive, a way to deal with it or utilize it; it started being something in my life that really made some sense.”
How old is your grandfather now?
“Ninety-six, I think. I’m not sure. I don’t give the man birthday gifts. I don’t send him cards. He’s in an old folks’ home and he’s still out of control. They gave him saltpeter for a while. In fact, now they’re giving him female hormones.
“What I’ve come to know is that he had to have had a sick childhood to still be this sick. He had a horribly violent father who knows what he was like to his little boy? I don’t know, there’s something that made him this way.” She pauses, shaking her head. “I’m not hateful anymore. I don’t love him. I don’t forgive him. I’m indifferent. I’m moving forward.”
-San Diego’s Weekly Reader; City Lights, December 16, 1993-