Betty Branch catalog (6-21-23)) - Flipbook - Page 20
All Fall Down
In 1983, at the time of the gang rape of a woman on a pool table in a New Bedford, Massachusetts bar, I was in Peru. I was enthralled
with the country, the people, the beautiful ceramics of pre-history: vessels, urns, pitchers, and bowls with human or animal features.
I felt their magic; a kind of visual imprinting occurred. Returning to Virginia, news of the rape came to me through my mother.
I did not want to think of this horror. I did not want to hear the terror in my mother’s voice — that such a thing could happen in
her world — and by implication, to her. I resented the immediacy of her pain and the urgency for my identification with it. Three
days later I found myself doodling, drawing while talking on the telephone. Simple images reminding me of nursery rhymes, the
calico dog and the gingham cat, appear on my paper, ripped and torn. It is difficult to depict a rape. It is often even difficult to
prove that it happened. My need to translate the feelings of violation and mutilation of spirit into tangible, visible form possessed
me and was only satisfied when I began to work in clay. Wheel-thrown, hollow clay units like the calico dog, sawdust spilling out,
like the ceramics of Peru, became the image of violation. The vessel, long associated with the physical body, became the visual
manifestation of the idea. When the vessel is broken, violation cannot be denied. These are abuse and victimization, the terrorism
of children as well as women, human forms reduced to fragments with no mouth for outcry, no hands for defense, no feet to flee.
Betty Branch, 1984
Mama
An Outrageous
Violation
Hush lit’l baby don’t say a word,
Mama
Mama
Mama’s gonna buy you a
mocking bird.
If that mocking bird don’t sing
Mama
CARNAGE
tribute consisting
of animal meat.
The flesh of slain
Animals or (wo)men
Alle Alle Home Free
Ring-Around the Rosies
Pocket Full of Posies
All Fall Down
Great and bloody
slaughter
“Gingham Dog
and
Calico Cat”
Sawdust spilling out –
Hush-a-bye,
Hush-a-bye
Go to sleep little baby
Betty Branch, 1984
Way down yonder
Down in the meadow,
There’s a poor lammie.
The bees and the butterflies,
Buzzing round its eyes,
The poor little thing cried
Oposite:
All Fall Down, 1983
Low-fired porcelain
Dimensions variable
Collection of the artist
Mammy.
Betty Branch, 1994
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