BIOTECH & MENSTRUAL BLOOD

MENSTRUAL MATERIAL: BODIES AS LABORATORIES

This section brings together WhiteFeather's most recent works, based on thirteen years of hands-on experience with tissue culture, five years of doctoral research, and independent work in numerous international laboratories. These works engage menstrual matter, cellular processes, and embodied biological systems as sites of knowledge production.

Projects including IMARA (Interstitial Machine for Aggregate Reparative Anatomies); Sentient Clit: The Pussification of Biotech; Z-stack/Period Brain; From Cup to Dish: Bioprinting and Menstrual Stem Cell Culture; Blood Magic in Biotech, and The Witch in the Lab Coat reposition the body—the menstruating, sensing, and desiring body as a generative laboratory.

Through developing techniques and protocols of cell culture and tissue engineering, including 3D bioprinting, neuronal differentiation, flow cytometry and cell characterization, cell staining, microscopy, and live cell imaging, these works feature biological materials as active participants in processes of making. Microbiology protocols such as RNA sequencing complement the knowledge base by providing additional data. Through these processes, the laboratory is reframed as a feminist space of embodied inquiry, moving away from ideals of control and optimization toward practices of care, repair, and relational engagement.

Within this framework, menstrual material emerges as an under-recognized biomaterial and techno-alchemical medium, capable of producing new forms, knowledge systems, and speculative futures. These works challenge dominant biotechnological paradigms by privileging situated knowledge, affective experience, and the material intelligence of living systems.

A note on navigation: Clicking the images will take you to the individual project pages.

IMARA—
INTERSTITIAL MACHINE FOR AGGREGATE REPARATIVE ANATOMIES

2025-present

IMARA is a modified bioprinting platform that fabricates adaptive, multi-species organs through digitally fabricated, hybrid anatomical structures and bioactive materials. Imagining a speculative future of bodily repair, it reconfigures biofabrication as a process of care, maintenance, and ongoing negotiation between bodies, machines, and vital matter. At once a real-world bioengineering tool and a feminist future imaginary, IMARA operates between material practice and speculative worldbuilding. Developed with support from Artengine through an eight-month worldbuilding lab for radical futures, and from Alarcón Lab (University of Ottawa Heart Institute).

Z-STACK / PERIOD BRAIN

2024-2025

Z-stack and Period Brain engage cellular imaging as a process of accumulation, drawing on microscopy techniques in which multiple focal planes are layered to produce time lapse sequences, in both material and digital form. Vision is constructed through successive slices, assembling depth from discrete strata. What appears continuous is revealed as multiple temporal and material layers.

The two works resulted from a three-month residency at the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine, supported by Cultivamos Cultura, wherein WhiteFeather conducted experiments in neuronal induction and differentiation of her menstrual stem cells.

SENTIENT CLIT: THE PUSSIFICATION OF BIOTECH

2023-2024

Sentient Clit: The Pussification of Biotech investigates the potential of lab-grown clitorises through 3D bioprinting with stem cells derived from menstrual fluid. The project integrates laboratory research with video and sculptural forms to challenge male-dominated narratives in biotechnology and reframe pleasure beyond reproductive function. Developed in collaboration with Jiabao Li, the project further engages economies of visibility and consumption through its use of digital platforms. Sentient Clit interrogates the ethics of sentience, consent, and embodiment in bioengineering, advancing a technofeminist approach.

FROM CUP TO DISH: BIOPRINTING AND MENSTRUAL STEM CELLS

2022

This project stems from an invitation to collaborate with scientists at a Montreal-based bioengineering research laboratory, to undertake a focused investigation into 3D bioprinting. Working with a high-end CELLINK bioprinter, WhiteFeather developed prototypes of menstrual cups as anatomical scaffolds for the cultivation of her own menstrual stem cells. This research extended her doctoral work in tissue engineering using menstrual fluid (2019–2023), while opening a new line of inquiry into the symbolic and biological potential of menstrual architectures.

THE WITCH IN THE LAB COAT

2109-2023

The Witch in the Lab Coat is a doctoral research-creation project and scientific investigation that explores the intersection of feminist witchcraft and tissue engineering through the development of a body-based, performance-informed laboratory practice. Led by WhiteFeather Hunter, the project was conducted at SymbioticA International Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts within the School of Human Sciences at The University of Western Australia, with additional laboratory research at Université de Montréal, University of Ottawa, and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, and archival research at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic.

The project unfolded through multiple iterations across academic, artistic, and curatorial contexts. A core sub-project, Mooncalf, is an original research trajectory initiated by WhiteFeather that investigates the development of menstrual serum for tissue culture, alongside methods for isolating stem cells from her own menstrual fluid. Her early experiments with menstrual serum were featured by Merck Sigma-Aldrich for the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (2021), as part of their #nextgreatimpossible series. Another sub-project, Bioart Coven, distributed the practice of technofeminist witchcraft into an enduring international collective.

BLOOD MAGIC IN BIOTECH

2021

Blood Magic in Biotech is a performance-based bioart project that investigates the vaginal microbiome through processes of self-directed genomic extraction, data analysis, and embodied laboratory practice. Working across domestic and institutional laboratory environments, the artist-researcher positions her own body as both subject and site of inquiry, generating microbiome data through daily self-sampling across a full menstrual cycle.

Using 16S rRNA sequencing and computational analysis, the project examines the microbial communities of the vaginal ecosystem while simultaneously interrogating the epistemological frameworks through which such data is produced and interpreted. Laboratory protocols are reworked through autotheoretical and performative strategies that re-personalize data, embedding it within lived experience, memory, and cultural context.

The work unfolds through video, performance, and data visualization, in which acts of swabbing, extraction, coding, and analysis become ritualized gestures. These processes expose the choreography of scientific knowledge production, revealing how data is shaped through layers of mediation, reduction, and symbolic encoding. By reintroducing subjectivity into these systems, the project challenges the notion of biological data as neutral or objective.

Situated within frameworks of technofeminism, gut feminism, and autotheory, Blood Magic in Biotech engages microbial life as a network of responsive, relational actors. Through this work, vaginal and menstrual materials—historically framed as waste, pollutant, or hazard are reclaimed as sites of knowledge production.