Artist Statement
My practice is rooted in my experience as a woman, linked to a larger shared experience of the feminine, its histories and its mysticism. My work facilitates a connection between the physical and spiritual through feminist structures, ritual and performance.
I create visualisations of this experience, exploring the feminine away from, or in contention with, patriarchal violence and the male gaze. These ideas are materialised through a performative way of working, to create film, sculpture, props, photography, installations or performance in its own right. I work with mediums which reflect and facilitate this contextual basis, creating a certain narrative, function or theory, which engage with the feminine from their conception. Fantastical narratives act as a vehicle to create this separate and fictional space, to wield the feminine energy that makes us ‘other’. Nature acts as a space to explore the feminine, isolated from other people and social constructs. Folkloric and mythic links between the feminine and nature, from sirens to witches, also create a rich context for the image of woman within nature. This tension between everyday spaces and mythical narratives allows a blurring of lines; a ritualisation of objects.
My practice aims to focus on healing and catharsis for women, by connecting with a long lost feminine soul, which Pinkola Estes calls the ‘Wild Woman’, that exists within any and all women, outside the harmful binaries of the Enlightened patriarchy. Whether historical or fictional, narratives and characters within my practice remind and reconnect women of their innate power. The nature of my practice always begins with my own experience as a woman, whilst drawing on spiritual and mythical sources, locating the work not in one context, but giving space for alive connections to take place.
The collaborative aspect of my practice is important in sparking these connections, whether this be through participant-performers, collaborators, friends, peers and viewers, as the feminine experience is a shared one, with different experiences for marginalised women than the ones that mainstream feminism caters to. Through embodying ritual characters and their actions, participants are genuinely encouraged to connecting with this entity, which is then translated to an audience through a different facet of my practice.
My work focuses on a reconnection with a lost power that exists in all women; a power that transcends time and culture, becoming more powerful the more the woman is repressed, giving an alternative narrative to trauma as a woman. Following on from the ongoing legacies of Surrealist and Feminist art, my work aims to connect with and reclaim the spiritual and feminine power that has been repressed and women have been denied. These narratives may be a utopia, a history, a fiction or another world; my practice does not exist in complete reality nor fantasy, but the in-between; the home of the feminine soul.