English-speakers often say that “blood is thicker than water” when talking about the bond of biological families. And yet, for those who cannot survive by this adage, there is the echo of a longer proverb:  “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”

This hidden inversion, offering the possibility of a future more stable than our beginnings, is a lifeline for survivors of developmental trauma. Without a stable past to tether us, we float through life in a grief-state unnamable to those who have not lived within this space. We learn to speak in a shorthand of half-truths, trying to translate the intimate loss of our childhood into terms intelligible for daily human interaction.

Blood & Water is a rejection of this sanitized translation. Developmental trauma lives in a pre-linguistic space, which means our experiences are bound to no recognizable shape or form. Here, we invited survivors of all types of early trauma to create without fear of the truth. In this folio, we believe that our wounds can be both grotesque and beautiful, past and present, universal and utterly unique, if only we look long enough.

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