‘Limited to practising art with needle and thread, women have nevertheless sewn a subversive stitch – managed to make meanings of their own in the very medium intended to inculcate self-effacement.’
– Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: The Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, 1996.
Influenced significantly by ‘The Subversive Stitch’ by Rozsika Parker, my practice is founded on the relationship between women and the crafts as I work with threads and materials that can be associated with domesticity and oppression.
Inspired by many patriarchal narratives of sexual difference, the Freudian theories regarding women’s ‘lack-of’ due to the absence of the penis/phallus, perceived as the signifier of power, and the vagina as ‘a place of shelter for the penis’ are at the basis to my most recent artworks. By obsessing over the phallus and purchasing a multitude of vibrating bullets, the stigma and taboo of female sexuality is challenged within my ‘Phallus Project’. Through my art I am able to ask questions of culture as philosophy does in regards to the concept of the phallus and femininity.
My sculptural works which are paradoxically attractive and grotesque, are an outcome of the meticulous and repetitive process of stuffing and stitching, of drawing the needle through the flesh-like materials, these actions become almost instinctual through repetition. Allowing the viewer to be instinctual too is of importance, as the tactility and form presented will attract but repulse others.