My gaze was caught by a site-specific 9,000-year-old rock painting of a woman wearing a skirt and lying on her side painted as a “hole” in her body. Scholarship into the history of the Paint Rock site located near Junction, Texas, failed to note a faint voice bubble issuing from her mouth, creating a paradox in interpretation: why had a white female captive (according to scholars) been given a voice at that time? I used this sight/incite to call attention to the erased cultural memory of women’s contributions to society by filling the “hole” (symbolically a water bowl in her womb) with water so that viewers could dampen a cloth and erase another’s history written on the stones at her feet, and then write their own stories on the stones. In this way, my artwork connects the history of a woman painted at Paint Rock to contemporary issues of women’s erased cultural memory, thus providing a palimpsest of the pictograph that “floats” simultaneously with each and every erasure to (re)create a fresh historical trace concerning this continuous erasure of women’s contributary cultures.
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