Manuel Palacio, artist, bring the light dance in the shadows
Stepping Into My Own Skin
The cockroach
Stepping Into My Own Skin
who is dying
Stepping Into My Own Skin
and the woman
Stepping Into My Own Skin
agree
Stepping Into My Own Skin
who is blind
Stepping Into My Own Skin
not to notice each other’s shame." — Audre Lorde
Stepping Into My Own Skin Female Black Woman Bronze Sculpture
“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing,” ― Audre Lorde
Female Black Woman Bronze Sculpture Stepping Into My own Skin Bronze
My female bronze black woman sculpture “Stepping Into My Own Skin” is defining who she is on her term. She claims.
“It is I, who will define my standard of beauty, of femininity, of womanism.”
Also a symbol of lust, of admiration. The black woman depicted is the figure of Manuel’s grandmother, mother, aunts, sisters, cousins, and daughters.
Painfully aware that once their bodies reach a certain age, they will be exploited. No matter how they’re dressed. At a certain age, their bodies become a commodity for the gaze of entitled men. Justified by patriarchy, and centuries of resentment of its influence.
To support their men, the women comply by stepping out of their skin.
In a lustful fanciful dance of pleasure and guilt.
“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and
attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.”
I began to ask each time: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, “disappeared” or run off the road at night.
Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties.
And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.
Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.
And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them.
And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
― Audre Lorde
