Measures of Constriction
To achieve the highest standards of beauty a person must endure sacrifice. Finances, comfort, even freedoms are but a few of the offerings brought to the altar of beauty, although historically these sacrifices have rarely been carried equally across the genders. In fact, it is typically females that bear the heaviest costs, incurring in practices that involve the most extreme sacrifice of all: the body.
In Measures of Constriction, I continue my investigation of the female body as a site of both subjugation and liberation, creating objects that speak of the way women must constrict their bodies to achieve societal standards of beauty, while simultaneously using techniques that reference stereotypical “female” work.
The forms I create derive principally from the corset, and thus speak to the way women’s bodies are physically transformed by constriction. My choice of material, boning, is also related to the corset, but it is applied using basketry and weaving techniques that recall another historically normative role of women: domestic labor.
Throughout my work, I attempt to connect these differing strands of stereotypical women’s roles to both critique and celebrate them, hopefully stimulating fruitful dialogs on what it meant to be a woman in the past, and what it means to be a woman in the 21st C.
