Luzene Hill (Cherokee Nation, USA, born 1956) is a performance and installation artist addressing sexual violence, the female body, and Indigenous cultural reclamation. Using textiles, symbols, and ritualized gestures, she transforms trauma into acts of visibility, recovery, and collective healing.
In Retracing the Trace, Hill lies on the floor as assistants scatter red cords around her body, leaving a voided silhouette. She then methodically gathers and attaches each cord to the wall. This ritual juxtaposes trauma’s dispersion with its repair, symbolizing women’s reclamation of body and memory through time.
Hill’s work positions the body as both subject and medium, transforming trauma into ritualized action. This approach recalls Amelia Jones’s feminist theory of performance art, where the body functions as an active site of agency rather than passive display. The red cords of Retracing the Trace evoke blood and violence while tracing time and memory, resonating with Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection—the process of confronting and redefining boundaries of self after trauma.
Her material framework revolves around fiber and temporality: the red cord is simultaneously fragile and resilient, embodying the elasticity of memory. Through repetition and manual process, Hill’s methodology becomes meditative and reparative. For my own practice, this encourages me to treat material not merely as form but as the residue of gesture—embedding layers of time and emotion into the sculptural surface.
Hill’s ritual of gathering and reattaching cords reveals art as a form of “temporal stitching,” where each act of repetition heals a rupture in memory. It inspires me to explore how, within my small-scale sculptures, the tactile and repetitive process can weave spaces of introspection and shared restoration.
#performance art #feminist art #body as medium #trauma and healing #ritual and repetition#personal and collective memory #red thread symbolism
Image credit & website:
https://luzenehill.com/retracing-the-trace
Written on: 19 October 2025
Ning-Hui Chung 
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