Final Exhibition Personal Statement

After visiting Venice back in October, I decided to work with the drawing I saw by Huguette Caland titled Self Portrait (1971). I began by drawing it in my sketchbook, then started to alter it until I was making many organic-looking vagina drawings. At the same time, I began making shaped paintings of the drawings, but none were showing my ideas the way I wanted them to. Therefore I decided to carry on drawing, reading and researching into feminism and vaginas until I knew exactly what I wanted to do with these drawings. I then decided to use clay a lot more, since it enabled me to make organic-looking pieces by being delicate like leaves and petals, but with the texture of a vagina. I made a large shaped painting based off of the idea of the ‘designer vagina’ where women get cosmetic surgery to remove ‘excess’ labia. I painted it a red-pink colour, then by accident, I took a picture of it at an angle that made it look like a rose. Because of this, I began making many clay vaginas that resemble flowers or other plants from my drawings and took pictures of them from angles that emphasised their organic look. This is mostly to add humour to a fairly serious topic of how women face pressure of having a good looking vagina, when they come in all shapes, thus comparing  them to something as natural as flowers that are all unique, and in a way that is only seen from certain angles, offers my opinion on the matter. Comparing vaginas to flowers is also historically a very famous metaphor, and often a sexist one. For example, we often hear about men ‘de-flowering’ women (taking their virginity), which certainly has negative connotations, implying a change and impurity to the women who’ve been sexually active.

I’ve also touched on this work in my Site Venue project, by taking photographs of myself modelling a vagina piece I’ve made as a performance Red Light District worker. I’m very interested in how the women are treated there and the constant laws that are changing to ensure their safety and respect, such as not letting tourists look and bother them for amusement. I was also keen on how an audience of people, such as my instagram following, would react if I released a series of similar scenes of the District. I also photoshopped a ‘peeking Tom’ through my window to make the series of photos blatantly humerous art pieces, making the negative reactions I received even more interesting. I’ll be looking into making more work like this in the future, as I really like the idea of developing my work by using them as ‘props’ in photographs, almost making the pictures a part of a performance piece. Using myself as the object came from looking into Cindy Sherman’s work at the beginning of the year, especially at her Untitled series, where she explores the male gaze, a concept theorised by Laura Mulvey in 1975. Sherman’s utilisation of the male gaze is complex: in one sense she diverts her passivity by being both the looker and the looked at, but in another way she consistently re-establishes the gaze by playing the victim or sexualised object. The “Untitled Film Still #6” (below), taken in 1977, Sherman exposes herself in her underwear, holding a mirror in one hand as she dons her usual emotionless expression. While the image is clearly sexualised, Sherman also demonstrates how femininity is a disguise, a performance, and then so too becomes the commander of the gaze. I want to almost recreate this idea by using myself as a sexual object, as I’ll certainly be in the cubicle for the male gaze, but I’ll also be fully in control of what is seen and my safety, something I believe sex workers lack the right of in the UK.