Artist’s Statement

My work operates in the space where feminine or femme sexuality and bodies interact with the public sphere and popular culture. The feminine body has an exhaustive history of being objectified and consumed (vis a vis the male gaze as explored by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)). What is fascinating to me is how frequently that visual consumption spills over into the conflation of the sexually passive femme body with literal consumables. Just think of the terms in which we refer to the feminine form: torsos can be apple, banana or pear shaped; breasts can be melons, jugs, marshmallows, or other mindbogglingly niche food items. It is fully and bizarrely integrated into our culture to conflate womyn's objectified and sexualized bodies with edibles.

On the flip side of this confusingly culinary coin, when the femme body has sexual agency and becomes active, she takes on a form which is monstrous, a man-eater. The idea of the sexually awakened woman or femme as something dangerous and unnatural is a trope rampant throughout mythology and lore in most Western canon. Take for example the tales of Medusa or Laemia from Greek and Roman mythology. Both were women who actively pursued and participated in romances with the gods (Poseidon/Neptune and Zeus/Jupiter respectively), and were punished for it by having their corporeal bodies melded with those of serpents, demonizing them. These stories reflect and enforce the idea that womyn with sexual agency and indeed power in general are something to fear by physically othering them from the relatable or human.

My practice has focused on this duality of objectification and demonization since my undergraduate thesis exhibition in spring of 2016. In the show I explored a number of media, ranging from pen and ink, to printmaking and cloth work, and was fairly direct in my approach of the subject. Half of my work conflated female forms and food, as in the lithograph Ripe Fruit where I amalgamated oranges and breasts or the series Produce Personified where I used pen and ink to bring out the shapes of fruit in actual breast prints. The other half illustrated some of the monstrous and powerful women we have come to know and fear, as in my cut-paper rendition of Laemia or installation focusing on the evil Queen from the Brothers Grimm tale of Snow White in Schneewittchen.

More recently my work has become less overt, still incorporating themes of food, sex and femininity, but focusing more on the geometry of the femme form and figuration itself through my cut paper practice. I am still fascinated and inspired by myth, but feel less pressure to grapple with established mythologies and am allowing myself to explore mythologies of my own making, creating art objects rooted in realism, but exaggerated and subverted to invoke a sense of the fantastic.