"Punish Them All"
Artist
Statement
After leaving the first session, I was overwhelmed by the stories I had heard. Trying to distill all the stories I’d heard down to one idea, or to even pick one story to work with was daunting. Mostly, I just kept coming back to the unfairness of the system, how everyone involved was punished, that no one seemed truly helped or healed.
I have been fascinated by symbology in art since I first discovered it. The idea of an item having more meaning than just what the item is delights me. As I continued to sit with my feelings, I kept coming back to how broken the system is. I decided to lean into it with symbols.
I was the steward of Jeff’s story. Jeff is an Indigenous man, thus I felt it was important to choose symbols that had appropriate meanings in both a broadly Indigenous cultural sense, as well as in my own ancestrally Celtic culture.
Crows can be seen as a symbol of transformation. A crow in many Indigenous cultures symbolizes mischief, the trickster. In Celtic culture, the crow is linked closely to death. The crow is a smart creature, and a sometimes eater of carrion.
The skull is also a symbol of transformation. A skull in Indigenous culture represents power and strength. In Celtic culture, it is associated with the soul and power. I chose to depict the skull without a bottom jaw, thus stealing the ability to speak from it.
I felt these symbols worked well to represent my feelings. The skull can be viewed as the people who have fallen prey to the justice system, the need for transformation within it, and the power it holds over everyone involved. The crow perches atop the skull, in a placement of power. It represents trickery in naming such a system the “justice system”, while echoing the need for its transformation. It can also be viewed more literally as death and a carrion eater at work.
While I work primarily in clay, the idea of creating a print called to me. The creation of the linocut gave me hours to think as I carefully cut away the soft material. As the once large linomat was being diminished in size, it made me think about all that the justice system takes away. The reductive nature of lino cutting was an apt metaphor for the subject at hand. In the stories we heard, there was so much loss. Loss of life, loss of love, loss of self.
Printing the image onto the mirror brings the viewer into the work. Utilizing the mirror as the surface for the work disallows passive viewership. The viewer is forced to become part of the work simply by viewing it.
Finally, the words “Punish Them All” were printed, all caps in red ink. I purposely made the letters seem rushed and runny. I chose red ink to represent spilt blood. The blood spilt by the act of taking a life, but also the blood spilt during incarceration. I harkened back to 1980’s pulp horror films, with the writing in blood on a mirror. Those movies always had a sense of dread, of impending doom, of there being no way out.
Analysis
As a horror aficionado and an Indigenous woman, I appreciate the way Regan pulled in these literary and cultural symbols (mirror, crow, skull, blood) to tell a story of injustice. Indeed, for many people who find themselves tangled in the apparatus of justice it can feel like being in a real-life horror film. As I scan through my notes, I am struck by the horror in many emotional experiences, like when Jeff speaks of the witnesses being “in a trance”, or when Stan couldn’t bring himself to read Chad’s journal, or when Abby opened the door to a gun pointed at her.
Also relevant to the horror-genre discussion is Jackie’s experience of conditional empathy, when the community shifted from judgement to compassion when Ron became a victim. Horror is often a genre that asks its audience to look past the surface of monstrosity and ponder how it was created. The most unsettling villains are produced through abandonment, trauma, secrecy, and social failure. Jackie’s experience of conditional empathy is especially telling: Ron was worthy of compassion only once he was harmed, though his humanity never disappeared, even when he caused harm. This mirrors a central tension in horror narratives, where the “bad guy” is legible only when their suffering is made visible, and it usually comes too late. For relational victims, this shifting moral gaze creates its own form of horror – being asked to hold love, grief, shame, and accountability in a world that insists on simple villains.
Self categorization theory helps explain why the good-guy/bad-guy binary is so psychologically powerful (Hornsey, 2008). In moments of threat, people are especially motivated to sharpen group boundaries, exaggerating difference in order to preserve a sense of safety and moral coherence (Hirschberger, 2018). Horror films turn ambiguity into monsters; justice systems often do the same by turning complex people into offenders. Jackie’s experience of conditional empathy demonstrates how categorical boundaries can shift, in this case, not based on who Ron was, but on which role he occupied. When he caused harm, he was in the out-group; when he was harmed, he was allowed back into the in-group. Moral belonging is socially constructed and constantly being negotiated.
Regan works to capture the larger conceptual issue of injustice, the broken mirror paralleling a broken system. Though hope shines through this piece as she pulls on the cultural threads that hold us together in our shared humanity (Hübl, 2023). Just as Victoria entered a conversational relationship with Stan, Regan enters a cultural relationship with Jeff, one that is fitting given Jeff’s characterization as “a cultural man” by the artists. In highlighting the symbolic meanings of the skull (power, strength, and soul) and the crow (trickster, intelligence, and death) she connects them as symbols of transformation. Indeed, many lives are transformed after harm occurs and by the legal system.
The legal system, like the Trickster Crow in many Indigenous traditions, presents itself as a source of order and truth while simultaneously producing disruption, contradiction, and harm. It promises clarity through law and rules, yet often replaces lived experience with narrow legal narratives that flatten complex realities. The system does not simply uncover truth but actively constructs stories that serve institutional power rather than relational understanding. Like the Trickster, it exposes the limits of rigid rules and binary thinking by the very chaos it creates. The result is not justice as healing, but justice as a destabilizing force that leaves individuals and families to carry the unresolved meaning of what has occurred.
Building on Hirschberger’s (2018) collective meaning-making, the criminal justice system’s Trickster-like creation of official narratives becomes a powerful force in shaping both individual and collective identity. When trauma is filtered through legal categories, court records, and public verdicts, these stories do not remain merely procedural; they become culturally embedded meanings that are carried forward across families and communities. As Hirschberger (2018) suggests, collective trauma can root itself in traditions, language, and shared understandings that extend the self beyond time and space, and in this context, legal narratives become part of that inherited identity. The group comes to know itself through the trauma as it was formally named and defined, even when that definition erases complexity or lived experience. The justice system’s Trickster stories do not resolve trauma but instead help fix it into collective memory, binding individuals to a shared but often incomplete account of what happened and who they are in its aftermath.
At the individual level, this Trickster-like storytelling similarly shapes how people come to understand themselves in the wake of violence. Family members and loved ones (and the larger public) are forced to make sense of what happened through legal labels—offender, victim, accomplice, witness—that rarely align with their emotional or relational realities. Meaning-making becomes constrained by narratives that were never designed to hold love, grief, loyalty, or moral ambiguity. Individuals may internalize these imposed identities, experiencing themselves through the same binary logic that structured the court’s version of events. Rather than fostering healing, this form of meaning-making often produces fractured selves, caught between what the system says is true and what their lived experience knows to be far more complex.
Regan draws our attention to this very complexity in her creation; a skull missing its jaw bone, being left without a voice (Watson & Angell, 2007) yet accountable to a system that cares little if at all for the harms it causes. She speaks to whittling away as representative of all the legal system takes, but I also see the reduction in the lino as a motion to peel back the layers, to engage in a deeper critical analysis of the systems around us. I take her piece as a call to action. It is striking that as the viewer, one cannot remove themselves from the piece; to look at it means to see yourself. Perhaps it is a reminder that while we as individuals did not create any of the colonial systems that function around us, we are all responsible, and maybe even complicit in allowing them to continue on as they are.