The process of artmaking has often been described as akin to giving birth or excreting by female creatives. Kate Bush has once declared that her music ‘comes out like diarrhoea’. ‘Lips, Trembling’ echoes the cries of pain and ecstasy of feminine creativity. The embroidered text transcribes a poem by Xie Ye, a poet who gave up her own career to support her husband, Gu Cheng, only to die under his axe years later. The poem is stitched in Nüshu (women’s script), a script practiced exclusively by women in regional Hunan Province, China. Nüshu often disguised itself as decorative needlework to avert patriarchal censorship. By honouring true ‘women’s work’, this piece becomes a murmuring of the silenced or ineffable lived experiences shared among women. ‘Lips, Trembling’ materialises the urge to expel abject emotions, not to reiterate the romanticised notions of hysteria and jouissance, but to consolidate a sense of female kinship.

我被那更为粗大的沉重的斧头

威胁着，被水泥的孔和面威胁着

被锈蚀，橡胶，爆炸，星际间抛来的碎片

碾压，一个厚皮肤的笑威胁着，我小小的生命

胚芽用芳香

威胁他们