“Christen Clifford is ...
Hilarious and uncensored”
Cancer: A Love Story is my first film project.
I’ve been a storyteller all my life: from pretending I had a boyfriend on the bus home in 1st grade to telling hundreds of people about maternal sexuality at The National Arts Club in Gramercy Park for The Moth.
I won a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship for nonfiction writing, and received Best Of Fringe Awards in New York and San Francisco for my solo storytelling shows.
I’m super excited to be working in this format.
My personal website:
“Christen Clifford leads a new wave of feminist performance art”
ARTIST STATEMENT
I want to live in my truth and inspire others to do the same. I use myself as an extreme example, I want the audience to connect to a universal experience. My work is autobiographical, sexual, raw, provocative, and I use bodily fluids and close ups for a visceral feeling. I make work about feminist health, sexual justice, and collective healing. I seek connection. It all comes down to love.
I have published personal essays in The Guardian, The Huffington Post and Broadly. My piece “Mother, Daughter, Mustache” in the NYT bestseller Women in Clothes was called “a standout essay” in Bookforum and Molly Ringwald read it on national radio for Selected Shorts. I did Feminist Peep Show at The New Museum in New York where I showed audiences my cervix and post-maternal vagina, including the scars I had from tearing during childbirth. My art has been called “hilarious and uncensored” by Flavorpill and “beautiful… and a call to arms” by The New York Times. In 2021, in collaboration with Project for Empty Space, I released BabyLove, a 28 page, four color risograph artbook about maternal sexuality.
This film is my attempt to show the world the way I think, what I see, my reality. My reality includes cancer and rape. I’m not alone: 1 in 6 women will have experienced some form of sexual abuse in their lifetime, and 1 in 8 women have or will be diagnosed with cancer. I want my film to be the best of new wave of hybrid storytelling digital projects- documentary, memoir, essay all in one; I want to make people laugh about cancer, feminism, and rapey stuff; and I want to reach the widest possible audience. I work with my embodied female gaze.
As an autobiographical documentary, I am using observational footage, recent interviews, video diaries, archival footage, self-shot medical documentation, as well as social media, performance documentation, archival footage of feminist art, some political news footage, and a dramatic recreation.
All of this will create a saturated, fun, raw experience with the intimacy of an Instagram story, the beauty of an experimental film, and a classic narrative structure. The arc will have a dense roller coaster of emotions, and layers will build up as my roles as a mother, artist, lover, wife, teacher, survivor and patient collide.
I want the audience to fall in love with me and I want them to hate me.
The story is structured through the timeline of my cancer from diagnosis to surgery to chemo to post treatment to healing. I want to tell the story of women’s bodies in the US through my body, my impulse to document my cancer, which lead me to questions about rape and sex and pleasure and feminism and gender and censorship and all other stuff that I’ve been struggling with my whole life. My diagnosis forces me to look deeply into my past in order to come to a place for healing and love.
This is my intimate, raw, honest story of my body and my relationship with my mother's body and children's bodies. Thank you for reading.
“ Clifford’s performance is at once confrontational and extremely vulnerable, sexy. ”
TOPIC SUMMARY
Me too. Not Surprised. Time’s Up. Women’s rights are human rights. Trans rights are human rights. Everyone deserves bodily autonomy. Women's bodies are battlegrounds. We are fighting for basic dignity. We are fighting for health care and birth control and the right to abortion on demand and without apology. We are fighting for the right to not be groped, harassed or raped.
There is no equality without reproductive rights, there are no reproductive rights without respect for the female body, and there is no respect for the female body without knowledge of it. I want to show you a female body in crisis from a female perspective.
Having cancer forced me to come to terms with the rape at 15, the silencing that followed, and abuses that I thought were all my fault.
It's a love story--of what it truly takes to accept myself and love others in a world that treats women like shit.
I did lots of stuff to try to heal– from the cancer and the rape. I have footage of talk therapy, growing my own magic mushrooms, DIY psychedelic therapy, acupuncture, reiki, healers, mediums, Somatic Experiencing exercises on a beach, massages, Kambo– this purge medicine from Peru where a shaman burns holes in your skin, applies tree frog poison and then you throw up for about four hours- and you do this for three days in a row. My artwork is featured throughout- the film itself becomes part of the healing- as I try to process and understand and tell stories in an attempt to reclaim my narrative. I want to live in my truth and inspire others to do the same.
“In addition to celebrating the beauty of her vaginal mucus, Clifford’s Pussy Bow is intended to serve as a call to arms at a time when women’s reproductive rights are increasingly under attack.”