My work’s subject matter revolves around intersections of desire, the feminine, shame, objecthood and the body.
‘They Look like Dead Birds Hanging’ is a series of mixed media collage and drawings that form a question posed towards ‘subjugation’.
As I meet myself within them, I ask what is it to be subjugated?
I look to how the process emits binary propositions as the subject ‘itself’, impelled by the transformative gaze yet inherently aware of my own impulses, wants- muted and then distorted.
I made this work through being as a body formed of breasts, lips and hips, buttocks, and feet- that subjects itself daily, willingly, and requisitely to the sexual desire of the male gaze through a virtual portal.
Depicted on paper is a visual echo of archaic form, of the transformation (and disfiguration) of the body and self, highlighting the interrelation between the two.
The sense of self is thus removed and replaced with the image of a fantasy object and another’s desire fuelled by a need and urgency to escape.
Flowing through Studies made with Crayola pencils/ markers/ crayons and ink is the rawness of this experience of sexualisation and the body’s response to it.
The Title comes from a sense of tragedy. That of the irony of shame, a disavowal of autonomy. Slippages between terms of the ‘erotic’ ‘pornography’ ‘vibrations’ ‘sexual deviance’ ‘embodiment’ ‘expression’ ‘estrangement’ create a Pleasure domain of the feminine essence.
Lustful, in ecstatic pleasure these Creatures, ‘animals’, are primal with intent, possessed by another’s desire, to re-possess their agency, is an act of revolt.
Swinging, jumping, prancing, probing, licking, brushing, staring at themselves, they titillate within the margins of society.
By feeding, they nurture desire.
Through the reinstating of sexuality an inherent power in being the giver of pleasure is unveiled.
These works tell of how I found my own place.
