All Things Considered
A collection of pieces produced for the graduating show at Leeds University. These large montage drawings were hung and pinned to the walls whilst the figures fought against the trappings that held them back so taughtly.
These pieces explore how women can perceive themselves through Western conventions of beauty and bodily norm, so institutionalised as to form social expectations that shape the female body.
They attempted to evoke the way in which women experience their own bodies; bodies that can be full of contradiction, sites of both pleasure and pain. The juxtaposition of montage elements and detailed drawing points to the violence of the work. The pain of these external elements symbolise the constraining mechanisms that women can encounter, which is interspersed with the pleasure of the physical act of drawing itself, incorporating the tactile satisfaction and visceral nature of mark-making as a body emerges on the page.
What do you see when you look at me?
A body of contradictions
Self-indulgence and self-improvement
A site of pleasure and pain
A site of domination
Eat me
Consume me
Desire me
Fracture my body into pieces
Fragment and dismember me
Tarnish me with a label you feel is right
I’ll try to live up to it.
Eating, cutting, tying, binding, growing, flowing
Restrain me or I might explode
Then what would you do?
Do you fear me?
Is that why you make me into something I’m not?
You silly little girl.
These pieces explore how women can perceive themselves through Western conventions of beauty and bodily norm, so institutionalised as to form social expectations that shape the female body.
They attempted to evoke the way in which women experience their own bodies; bodies that can be full of contradiction, sites of both pleasure and pain. The juxtaposition of montage elements and detailed drawing points to the violence of the work. The pain of these external elements symbolise the constraining mechanisms that women can encounter, which is interspersed with the pleasure of the physical act of drawing itself, incorporating the tactile satisfaction and visceral nature of mark-making as a body emerges on the page.
What do you see when you look at me?
A body of contradictions
Self-indulgence and self-improvement
A site of pleasure and pain
A site of domination
Eat me
Consume me
Desire me
Fracture my body into pieces
Fragment and dismember me
Tarnish me with a label you feel is right
I’ll try to live up to it.
Eating, cutting, tying, binding, growing, flowing
Restrain me or I might explode
Then what would you do?
Do you fear me?
Is that why you make me into something I’m not?
You silly little girl.
