WORLDBUILDING
In my research and visual work, I depict our sapphic eroticism and the dimension of pleasure. We visit these places in the spirit of transformation to connect with our erotic bodies, erotic power, queerness, sexuality, and pleasure. We create a space to hold this receptive element as a site of resistance to the forced removal of sexual power. I make intersubjective representations of the body, my body, her body, the sacred, the erotic, and sex. Our bodies become sites of investigation and resistance where sensuality, pleasure, and the power of the erotic are centred.
We go back to the beginning. For the first 30 000 years of human terrestrial life, God was a woman; we always knew to worship her. At some point along our long history, the patriarchy inserts the biblical narrative where tasting Eve’s fruit sires man’s expulsion from Paradise: The Fall. This incites their dominance over our bodies, our sexuality—women’s fruit, the serpent—cast as the devil, destructive and punishable temptation. Man is our innocent accomplice to whom we owe our Edenic loss, for whom we veil our erotic bodies and to whom our sexualities are owned. The effects of our fabled act justifying our ongoing sexual oppression.
We go back, here, and expose the doubleness of meta-history to take our power back. We reclaim atemporal Eden and re-press the clay, this is a parallel paradise, ours. We unravel and reorganize the story patriarchy tells, there has never been a Fall. This place is a Sapphic world, a feminine universe, and here in Paradise we have sexual and erotic autonomy. Our bodies are sites of investigation, sex acts, pussy sex, sensuality, pleasure, the power of the erotic. We hold our power in its intensity; in its generativity and recenter what was taken from us and used against us to its rightful place within each of us.
We transform the space into an imagined garden of paradise with iconography of our interiority, intersubjectivity, and pleasure. It is an altar to our bodies, a Parallel Paradise. This allows the concept of paradise to exist within and around us. Reclaiming associations with the serpent as a symbol of women's sexual power, free female sexuality, queer sex, and snake on snake. The serpent represents pleasure for our liberation, generating iconography for our sexually autonomous cult baptized in darkness.
Competing ideologies of religious iconography and explicit erotic sexual representation press against a threshold of representation. Cycling through symbols from previous worlds, the christian stories are obfuscated by the void; no longer the dominant narrative, the symbols release their previous meanings and represent something new.
MATERIALS, body, intimacy
We omit direct representation of the female form, allowing for a plurality of readings of how to locate the work within our own body through arousal and imagination. Using metaphor instead of directly depicting the body circumnavigates the male gaze and allows for the interpretive imagination. It allows for representation of feelings rather than how the body looks.
The materials of clay, film, resin, wax, salt, bronze are extensions of our earthly bodies and sexuality. These materials and processes are sexual, sensual and erogenous, and they undergo transformation. Wetness relates to the body - the evocative sensuous nature of wetness between our legs as a revolutionary feminist stance - and bridges the human and earthly worlds. The language of nature easily becomes abstraction and metaphor. Gushing, scissoring, dripping, fountains, pussy to pussy sex, pussy to mouth, breast, hands - these are radical representation.
In investigating our interiority, we are inter-subjective – instead of objects. In exploring our interiority, we create a story, a perspective about our bodies from interior experience and feelings. It is personal and intimate for every person; each person individually fills in the details. The sensory aspects of the materials invite the viewer to bring their own bodies in closer: closer to the work and to each other. Depicting intimate experiences and intimate materials creates space for people to be intimate with each other. It is a permission slip for arousal, a space where you can explore that side of yourself and see the value in pleasure. It is not cognitive or logical but based on the felt sense of the body and power in the body.
Layers of the feminine soften as we reconsider the story from this point of view: our own. Imagination and desire conjure a world into being that sapphics can enter into and see themselves in, when it comes to our bodies and power women are the sole owners of their sexual liberty, autonomy, and sovereignty.