In Arabel Lebrusan’s ‘Femicides’ installations (2024 onwards), a series of wall-based plaster tiles are embedded with sharp chunks and brittle slivers of broken china. Some smashed sections are flattened delicately against the surface; others are wedged and protrude as though pierced into flesh. The patterns formed by these broken ceramics are variously neat and chaotic, and many bear the traces of intricate original designs in bright turquoise, gold and deep red. Each tile represents a different woman or girl killed by a man in domestic crimes in a single year in the UK. The 2024 installation includes 69 separate tiles, made by a collaborative group of 21 volunteers.
As a young woman in Spain, Lebrusan was constantly aware of femicides reported in the news over more than three decades. They were covered in a sensationalist manner, with misogynistic undercurrents. Now based in the UK, the artist focused the final pieces on British figures. She noticed how these women’s lives and violent deaths ended up as cold numbers, soon losing a connection to their individual experiences. While she respects the privacy of each woman that the tiles represent, their individual formation invites us to relate with and explore each one, rather than experience them as a single mass. The work avoids memorialisation, instead using creative expression to make space for the viewer to consider lives lost to male violence.
The tiles might seduce the viewer with their delicate patterns and intriguing forms before their violent backstory is revealed. Likewise, crockery and household design has traditionally been used as a means of seduction into domestic life, its refined aesthetics creating an appealing veneer for domestic servitude, a distraction from the possibility of isolation and brutal violence. Some works are pretty while others appear messy and dangerous.
Lebrusan’s collaborators were originally sourced through an open call for female-identified individuals. The project follows a previous work, ‘Blunt Blades Exchange’ for which the artist invited nine vulnerable women from Women’s Support Centre Surrey to turn metal from knives confiscated by the police into rings. While she did not ask explicitly for the collaborators on ‘Femicides’ to reveal their own experiences, some shared first-hand memories of domestic violence while making the works. Others discussed the defined limits of abuse and how we carry and process trauma. The creators included a mother and daughter working together, and a group of university students. In community, these cross-generational voices explored how the collective view of male violence and female blame has warped and shifted over the years. While these conversations are not overtly named alongside the work, their presence in the making resonates through the pieces.
Some tiles are made by individual women while others are collaborative. It is important for Lebrusan to retain an element of freedom in her socially engaged practice, providing an idea and framework which her collaborators can build upon and expand. Some of the pieces of crockery were second hand, each with their own unknown domestic history, while others were brought by individual makers, imbuing the pieces with hidden personal narratives. Viewers might project their own experience onto the works; forming their own understanding of the women who owned or smashed each set.
The work highlights an often ignored yet pervasive form of male violence. It also allows us to think about female rage. Women are discouraged from showing anger or letting it out. With its smashed pieces and sharp edges, the work enables its makers to engage in a cathartic destructive act, before recreating the shards into something new. The works are both delicate and fierce, containing a multitude of emotional expressions that women are pressured to suppress and narrow down. These are active pieces, requiring the makers to work fast as the plaster sets quickly. They accept the possibility of female aggression in the face of unjust and barbaric male violence. They also put forth the possibility of healing within community, each work individually crafted yet part of a larger whole that brings light to the darkest forms of misogynistic force.