Bloom’s Blood

Rut Álvarez Valledor (ES)

Installation, 2014

This text-based work compiles all of the blood references appearing in chapter eighteen of Ulysses. The reading direction of these references is exactly the same style as the one used in the book.

This final chapter of Ulysses is in itself a bloodstream. On the one hand, because of the use of the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode, thoughts flow freely; nothing is joined. There is a lack of punctuation. On the other hand, Molly Bloom is bleeding. She is menstruating while her thoughts and feelings pass through her mind.

The text is presented on an over-sized replica of a microscope slide, as if it were a blood sample prepared for analysis. The text is written like a bloodstream. Like in chapter eighteen.

Rut Álvarez Valledor is a conceptual artist whose work uses a variety of materials and techniques to explore language and metalinguistics. In Bloom’s Blood, she has taken text from Joyce’s Ulysses that references blood and placed it on a mock-up of a microscope slide offering the language on blood up for analysis in much the same way as a blood sample in the lab.