For too long, women have been degraded, harassed and assaulted for their sexuality and femininity. If a woman wears too short of a skirt or too high of heels they are often categorized as slutty or promiscuous. What we wear says a lot about who you are, but it doesn’t define you. It also doesn’t give anyone the right to speak to you as if you are a lesser person or give you unwanted attention or touching. My work is centred around female sexuality and the need to reclaim the female body as our own.

 

Within my body of work there are different elements to each piece that all relate back to femininity. I looked at references from within nature and found the interesting male birds from paradise (New Guinea) which are the more colourful and vibrant sex and do elaborate dances to attract a mate. I found this interesting and opposite to today’s society and represented this in my work. I also looked into women as warriors and how women often aren’t represented as strong individuals and I wanted to change that. Looking into the history of women’s fashion I found crinoline as a restricting and unhealthy piece of clothing and I wanted to reconstruct this and expose the history to show just how far we have come.

 

With these aspects of femininity, I created my body of work to all incorporate elements of defence since women always seem to have to defend their sexuality to not allow it to define us. Using innovations in new forms and mediums within clothing, through the process of printmaking, my body of work was created.

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This body of work was created for the fourth year final exhibition in the Fine Arts (Visual Arts) program at Queen's University in 2018.

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