Drink My Blood reflects on the desire to take another into oneself: to connect, absorb, and become permeable to another presence. The work uses blood as a metaphor for intimacy, contact, and ritual, while placing the female body within a tradition that has often framed women through guilt, temptation, and exclusion.
Drink My Blood consists of three casts in crystal glass: the artist’s head and her hands. The hollow forms are filled with red wine, a liquid that evokes blood not literally, but as a metaphor for intimacy, contact, connection, and transformation.
The title refers to the Christian tradition in which wine symbolically becomes blood and is ritually taken into the body. Van den Berg shifts this reference towards another form of incorporation: the desire to take another person, another body, or another history into oneself. The work carries a quiet provocation, placing a female body at the centre of a ritual language from which women have often been excluded, judged, sexualised, or written out.
By using casts of her own head and hands, Van den Berg reclaims the symbolic relation between wine, blood, body, and devotion from a female perspective. Drink My Blood opens this imagery towards a female lineage, one shaped by embodied experience, connection, and histories that have often remained invisible within dominant religious narratives.
