Unravelling Frequencies

Due to copyright restrictions, the artist is not allowed to display the two following articles as a whole. She thus quotes the most relevant parts as follows:

Menotoxic Tulips

In the early 1920s, 400 years after the Swiss physician Paracelsus claimed that menstrual blood was one of the most noxious poisons in nature, Dr. Béla Schick and his followers carried out experiments that aimed to prove that harmful toxins circulated in a menstruating woman's bloodstream. Despite decade long research that lastet up to the late 1970s, doctors in the United States and in Europe were never able to conclusively verify this theory. While Menotoxins have been used to explain various health problems in women over the course of the 20th century, the theory is no longer taken seriously by most doctors (yet it is still very much alive at some fringes of alternative medicine). Today, menstrual blood is considered a valuable source for stem cell research aimed at curing neuro-degenerative diseases.

The artist's recreation of this experiment using her own blood, drawn from her arm vein during the first day of her menstruation, yielded that the tulips in the vases containing her 'menotoxic' blood lasted the longest. The slideshow juxtaposes the documentation of the experiment with images of a selection of plants that produce trimethylamine, the toxin allegedly produced by menstruating women; Chenopodium vulvaria, Mercurialis perennis and Berberis.