Jasmine Murrell’s Immortal Uterus (2010–17) is a site-specific sculptural installation
constructed from thousands of yards of VHS tape hand-woven into sheets. Murrell affixes the
sheets, like skin, onto a wire skeleton that is connected to the ceiling. Because of the mutable nature of the wire foundation, the work takes on a different form each time it is installed. The
iteration in Between Nothingness and Infinity occupied a volume measuring twenty by twenty
square feet from floor to ceiling, making it the largest work in the exhibition. A massive,
shimmering, black, amorphous sculptural presence, Immortal Uterus entices viewers to enter its
cavernous environment. Inside, among forms resembling stalactites and stalagmites, funnel-like
protrusions enclosing speakers play a soundtrack of a woman speaking in monologue while soft
blue lights permeate the space. Immortal Uterus is a totalizing, immersive experience in which
the viewer moves through a massive, anonymous black womb, as though entering another
world.
Murrell created Immortal Uterus as a “gesture of experience” that describes the
inexorable burden that has historically faced black women. She drew upon W. E. B. Du Bois’
concept of “double consciousness” for inspiration in re-creating a fragmented self-awareness.
Du Bois, the scholar, poet, and civil rights activist, initially introduced this concept in an article
in The Atlantic entitled “Strivings of the Negro People” (1897). Republished six years later in his
book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the article articulated the division of identity Du Bois saw
as inherent to the black American experience. He defined double consciousness as:
[A] peculiar sensation [. . . ], this sense of always looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world
that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-
ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength
alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
Du Bois set up a theory of a bifurcated self-consciousness defined by race and nationality.
One consequence of this fragmentation is the impossibility of perceiving oneself as a whole being,
simultaneously possessing colored skin and belonging to a historically white culture.
“The tape of a world,” with which Du Bois’s black subject is measured according to cultural standards of whiteness,
is a perspective that equates blackness with “otherness” by pointing out and problematizing difference.
In the wake of Du Bois’s articulation of double consciousness, various scholars have used
his framework to describe the psychosocial effects of racism. Several writers have expanded the
idea of double consciousness into “triple consciousness” by introducing another factor of
identity, whether it be gender, sexuality, class, or ethnicity. Artist Jasmine Murrell employs triple
consciousness in Immortal Uterus by evoking the uniquely fraught experience of being Black, American, and female.
In the early 2000s, [. . .] Murrell began taking trips to
Ethiopia where she learned the craft of weaving from local women. She then taught the skill to
her friends and colleagues in the United States including members of the Yams Collective, who
assisted her in weaving the VHS tape sheets for Immortal Uterus. She also worked with
professional women weavers in South America to assist in the creation of hundreds of VHS
sheets. To honor the process of the making of the uterus, Murrell conducted interviews with
some of the women who helped create the sculpture. One of these recorded interviews, with a
young Ethiopian woman who had spent time in the United States, played in the sound pod
portion of Immortal Uterus for Between Nothingness and Infinity. The recording recounts her
experience of displacement and loss of self when immigrating to the U.S. Although not religious
in her home country, while living abroad she was overwhelmed by the vapidity and
sensationalism of American culture, which prompted her to turn back to her native religion.
Although in the installation the woman remains nameless and is present only via her voice, the
autobiographical nature of the monologue serves to concretize the abstracted experience of being
within Immortal Uterus. It is a reminder of the real women who both physically constructed the
artwork and whose stories are represented by it.
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— Allison Littrell
The collective HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican?, otherwise known as the Yams, characterizes a new generation of revolutionary artists and thinkers who refuse to participate in the prescriptions of the marketplace and traditional authority.
Instead they create radical, new methods of engagement. The Yams’ members—thirty-eight self-described Black and queer artists, poets, and scholars—employ a methodology directed toward creating a strong voice for the Black community amid a
history of racism and inequality.
— Bansie Vasvani, Art 21 Magazine
