Java-Sept-Pages-2018

the mask, and they had the same reaction. “They
remembered him,” she says, “and they knew he was
a danger to them.”
The next time he returned, it was more than a year
later. But the same crows and even their offspring
remembered him. It was as if the older generations were
passing down their knowledge through storytelling. “It
was like they were saying, ‘Danger! Danger!’”
Adkins correlates this communication and the habit
of the crows chattering to a community she’s recently
become active in – women who are living with the
pain, surgery and other effects of endometriosis, and
sharing their experiences online.
“Each painting is a diaristic allegory of a moment in
my continued journey with a debilitating, chronic,
under-researched and incurable disease known as
endometriosis,” she says in a statement on Facebook.
In the past couple of years, she started to find other
artists living with “endo,” like Mab Graves and Ellie
Kammer, on Instagram.
The crows in Adkins’ new paintings have more than
one meaning, she says. Yes, a group of them visiting
her body while she’s recovering in the hospital can
represent the women chatting online, but for many
people, crows are ominous creatures that inspire
terror. In this way, crows could also represent the
disease itself.
Adkins also incorporates imagery from the desert in
much of her work. Cacti with their threatening thorns
seem to linger, and the unpainted areas on the wood
panels suggest desert sunsets and sandy places.
Several of the images include pomegranates, and
their blood-red inner fruit is suggestive of the female
erogenous zones and reproductive interiors.
Adkins is using the juice of the pomegranate in a
creative and new way, too. Her opening will not only
show around twenty paintings but will also contain
two installation works and a video. One of the
installations is composed of a familiar desert plant,
the devil’s claw, or Proboscidea, with a long chain of
what looks like soft cotton dangling from its interior.
Proboscidea are well known for the fact that, after
flowering, their dried husks fall off and have a way
of “clawing” onto animals, birds or even people, and
“traveling” to other fertile fields. Eventually they fall
open and release their seeds.
The cottony-looking material in Adkins’ installation
is actually the innards of several tampons that she
unraveled by hand. On closer inspection, it is eerie
to see that this isn’t natural cotton at all, but instead
appears to be an artificially produced, inorganic
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MAGAZINE
material that doesn’t look soft. At the bottom of the
fibrous material, Adkins has attached one of the
devil’s claw seeds, to represent ovulation.
Ten of these unraveled seedpods appear together.
However, one of them is different. Going back to the
pomegranate juice, Adkins has soaked one of the
unraveled “cotton” tails in the juice. The bloodied
one stands out among the set to represent the fact
that statistically one in ten women will develop
endometriosis in her lifetime.
“It affects six million women [in the U.S.], but they’ve
been using that number for years,” Adkins says. “I’m
sure there’s actually more. It can take a woman up to
ten years to get a correct diagnosis.”
For Adkins, it took her six years to discover what was
the cause of so many of her physical problems. She
had known something was wrong ever since she was
a teen. “But when you’re young, you don’t want to
talk about your period,” she says. “It’s very taboo.”
Even though she grew up in a family of six with
almost all sisters, it was still too embarrassing to talk
about. She says she remembers pain and extremely
heavy bleeding. “I remember I’d bleed into my
clothing and have accidents at school. I would have
to go home and change my clothing.”
Then, in her twenties, it got worse. She says she
began to ask doctors questions and seek more
medical help. One doctor told her she had irritable
bowel syndrome. Another told her she was simply
more prone than most women to bladder infections.
Another, a gynecologist, suggested she seek
psychiatric help because it appeared to him that the
manifestations of her pain might just all be in her head.
She finally visited a female gynecologist that a family
member recommended. She doesn’t necessarily
attribute the correct diagnosis to the fact that her
new doctor was a woman. But this doctor did know
what endometriosis was and also knew how to
detect it. In Adkins’ case, she was correct.
“There is no blood test for this. There is only surgery
to diagnose and treat it,” Adkins says. “That is what’s
amazing about this disease: nothing has changed in
the way they treat it in twenty years.” Adkins also
says research into it is very underfunded. However,
the Endometriosis Foundation of America claims that
it affects around 200 million women worldwide.
“There are just as many people who have endometriosis
as there are who have type 1 diabetes,” Adkins says.
One of the startling facts about this disease is that, like
cancer, its cells can multiply and spread throughout a