Flesh Hierophanies
Honours Project, RMIT University, 2021
Alternating Current Art Space, Windsor, 2022
My practise explores the relationship between the female body, Christian religion, and institutional power. This is an autobiographical project which draws on my experience of growing up in the Catholic Church. My sculptural and print based material explorations critique the transfer of power between institutional religious spaces and the domestic. I put forward my own female corporeality in defiance, expressed through material explorations, installation, and printmaking. Feminist writings of Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler are used to dissect, understand and defy the influence of institutional and social power on the female body. My expanded printmaking processes explore the concepts of trace, absence and index using mono printing, lino carving, casting, tracing and embossing techniques. I also engage with Katheryn Reeve’s concept of matrix as womb, and an extension of the female body. Scars, stretch marks and skin are identifiable in the surfaces, and allow the works to be easily anthropomorphised. The centrality of encounter is present in relationships between the human body, materiality and architecture. My work reclaims a softness, a focus on the material body and presents the female body as a site of contemplation and devotion.
Honours Project, RMIT University, 2021
Alternating Current Art Space, Windsor, 2022
My practise explores the relationship between the female body, Christian religion, and institutional power. This is an autobiographical project which draws on my experience of growing up in the Catholic Church. My sculptural and print based material explorations critique the transfer of power between institutional religious spaces and the domestic. I put forward my own female corporeality in defiance, expressed through material explorations, installation, and printmaking. Feminist writings of Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler are used to dissect, understand and defy the influence of institutional and social power on the female body. My expanded printmaking processes explore the concepts of trace, absence and index using mono printing, lino carving, casting, tracing and embossing techniques. I also engage with Katheryn Reeve’s concept of matrix as womb, and an extension of the female body. Scars, stretch marks and skin are identifiable in the surfaces, and allow the works to be easily anthropomorphised. The centrality of encounter is present in relationships between the human body, materiality and architecture. My work reclaims a softness, a focus on the material body and presents the female body as a site of contemplation and devotion.