“How Blood Becomes Milk” took place in the gallery Meno Parkas on their twentieth anniversary exhibition. It was the year when I gave birth to my first child; a year when I had to rethink and recreate my life and values, and challenge myself to keep up my artistic practice.

Usually in my works I’m dealing with my fears, complexes, and mental issues; I am trying to overcome my own borders and raise more universal questions about the society that we live in. Slow, repetitive actions, an aesthetics of boredom—often a naked body and/or some physical pain, and minimal visual expression—is what my audience usually expects.

The performance starts when I begin dragging a block of frozen breast milk while crawling backwards on my knees. This action takes most of the performance time. The audience is calm and steady. I put the block on a stand, take stuffing material from the belly of a teddy bear and start lighting it on the block of milk. At the same time, while smiling and looking at an audience, I start singing “happy birthday to you” louder and louder. People start smiling and singing with me. We do it for several minutes and at the very end, I squash a beetroot hidden in my hair. The red juice dribbles down my face.

I tried to look at myself with a little bit of irony and laughter with this work. Although at the same time, I was still dealing with my inner issues. I wanted it to be multilayered: with a little bit of seriousness, a little absurdity, some entertainment and something hidden beneath. While beetroot juice evoked blood and was seen as fake, the real wounds and pain from crawling on my knees on the concrete floor were hidden from the audience’s eyes.