Rebecca Belmore frequently uses the body to confront violence and injustice against Indigenous people, particularly women. A member of the Anishinaabe nation, she affirms, "My body is a place from which to address the whole notion of history and what has happened to us as Aboriginal people." The female figure in Fringe assumes the same reclining pose as the beautiful odalisques depicted by nineteenth century European artists, but bears a violent slash from shoulder to hip. Here, the artist makes reference to a specific incident about a Cree woman whose surgeon had sewn beads into the ends of her sutures in Winnipeg in 1980.
The deep scar traversing the figure's back was created using special-effects makeup. What appear to be thin rivulets of blood running from the gash are composed of small red beads, a detail that evokes both Belmore's heritage and the material violence enacted upon the bodies of Indigenous women, which includes but is not restricted to the ongoing epidemic of domestic violence as well as missing and murdered Indigenous women in twenty first-century Canada. Despite the gravity of the represented woman's injury, Belmore's Fringe is also about healing. Of this work, Belmore states, “As an Indigenous woman, my female body speaks for itself. Some people interpret the image of this reclining figure as a cadaver. However, to me it is a wound that is on the mend. It wasn’t self-inflicted, but nonetheless, it is bearable. She can sustain it. So it is a very simple scenario: she will get up and go on, but she will carry that mark with her. She will turn her back on the atrocities inflicted upon her body and find resilience in the future. The Indigenous female body is the politicized body, the historical body. It’s the body that doesn’t disappear” (Rebecca Belmore in conversation with Kathleen Ritter, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2008).