So during this spring break I hope to create a monkey fist knot made out of tubing. I want it to be filled with some sort of liquid and bits of string within.
When I first made a monkey fist knot, I thought that it was a good representation of a heart. (I also had help realizing this from a classmate in sculpture) So I might take this in the direction of being an abstract heart.
I'm still puzzeling through some of the aspects of this project, like what would be a good center to the heart. It needs to be something precious and worthy of being a core of this heart.
I was looking at the historic, religious and mythic background of blood recorded in Wikipedia. I will do more research the significance of blood.
I might think of a mixture of these two background ideas...
->European Paganism = Among the
Germanic tribes (such as the
Anglo-Saxons and the
Norsemen), blood was used during their sacrifices; the
Blóts. The blood was considered to have the power of its originator, and, after the butchering, the blood was sprinkled on the walls, on the statues of the gods, and on the participants themselves. This act of sprinkling blood was called
bleodsian in
Old English, and the terminology was borrowed by the
Roman Catholic Church becoming
to bless and
blessing. The
Hittite word for blood,
ishar was a cognate to words for "oath" and "bond", see
Ishara. The
Ancient Greeks believed that the blood of the gods,
ichor, was a mineral that was poisonous to mortals.
As a relic of Germanic Law the cruentation, an ordeal where the corpse of the victim was supposed to start bleeding in the presence of the murderer was used until the early 17th. century.
->
Chinese & Japanese Culture = In Chinese popular culture, it is often said that, if a man's nose produces a small flow of blood, this signifies that he is experiencing sexual desire. This often appears in
Chinese-language and
Hong Kong films as well as in
Japanese culture parodied in
anime and
manga. Characters, mostly males, will often be shown with a
nosebleed if they have just seen someone
nude or in little clothing, or if they have had an erotic thought or fantasy; this is based on the idea that a male's blood pressure will spike dramatically when aroused.
