Sefira Bell-Masterson

“Now Enter Grief and Kneeling”
Sefira Bell-Masterson

The audience entered the room, which was empty except for a ladder, three mirrors, a clock on the wall and a scale piled high with used tissues on a white pedestal. Sefira was dressed in a white lacy dress, with chains and locks wrapped around her body and leg. She wore a white mask on her face with a line of safety pins down one side. The mask was chained to her body. Sefira was standing on the top of a ladder when the audience entered. She set the clock to 9:00 and made a hash mark below the clock in white chalk on the black wall. She then descended the ladder and approached the first mirror. She wrote “Day 1” and then a series of numbers in red lipstick on the mirror. She added the numbers, then returned to the ladder and climbed back up. At the top of the ladder she took out a tissue, blew her nose and threw the used tissue onto the pile on top of the scale below. She then set the clock to 12:00 and descended the ladder again. Below the first set of numbers she wrote a second set, climbed back up the ladder, blew her nose, threw the tissue onto the scale, and set the clock to 6:30. She descended the ladder, wrote a zero below the other numbers, turned to face the audience and told them “I’m not very hungry, I had a big lunch.” She ascended the ladder, blew her nose, threw the tissue on the scale, set the clock to 9:00, made a hash mark next to the previous one, descended the ladder, wrote “Day 2” and then a series of numbers on the mirror which she then totaled. She repeated this process five times. Each time she wrote a number much smaller than the others she would turn to the audience and make an excuse for not eating. Progressively the lipstick she was using to write on the mirrors smudged red onto her dress, her mask and the tissues she was using.

For years, as a womyn with an eating disorder, ritual dominated my life. There were the rituals of weighing, the rituals of counting, the rituals of exercise, the rituals of grieving, the rituals of examining myself and my favorite – the ritual of lying.

For this piece, I took these rituals and compressed them, enabling them to communicate new meaning. When combined, the rituals became self reflective. Grief was weighed on my digitally precise scale. The record of my caloric consumption and expenditure covered the mirrors, obscuring my image. My voice as I told one of my expertly crafted lies fell flat against the evidence irrefutably visually assembled.