Vessel by Frances Bukovsky

from the artist: “Vessel weaves together symbolism and reality to explore the experience of healing one’s identity post hysterectomy after years of misinformed medical treatment. This body of work discusses expectations of gender and fertility, the mental and physical effects of living within a diseased body, and the transformation of life after becoming surgically sterile.

In these images I investigate the healing process after undergoing a medically necessary total hysterectomy at the age of 23 and explore what it feels like to be freed from the expectation of motherhood after 7 years of experiencing pressure to retain my fertility. Pathology showed I was most likely never fertile and I grieved through these images over years spent bleeding for months on end, relationships made uncomfortable by blood, endless disabling pain, and the hormonal nightmare I underwent from both diseases and attempted treatments. I also explore the changed landscape of my body and what it feels like to experience gender divorced from reproduction.

To be viewed as incapable of making decisions about my own fertility and my own body as an adult compelled me to see myself as a vessel of other’s expectations. Within this series I reclaim the vessel of my body and explore my own identity in ways that had been accessible prior to the removal of most of my diseased reproductive system.“