The Body Beautiful: Imprisonment or Liberation?
Why do women choose to wear corsets, when these constricting garments are such a potent symbol of their subjugation?
I think, for many reasons:
- in pursuit of the Body Beautiful, as a means of conforming to a body shape that we, and society, conceive to be perfection;
- in defence of the Body Beautiful, as a representation of modesty and sexual abstention (the chastity belt);
- in celebration of the Body Beautiful, alluring and seductive;
- in constraint of the bulging Body (un)Beautiful;
- to liberate the Body Beautiful, by applying a mask that permits the wearer to adopt novel behaviours under cover of a bodily disguise.
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It is the diversity and conflict inherent in these ideas that interests me – the influences in women’s lives that cause us to choose to constrain or to liberate ourselves. Women everywhere seek the Body Beautiful in their different ways – if not by corsetry - then by dieting or by working out at the gym, painting, powdering, shampooing, deodorising and re-perfuming. The crux of the conflict lies in that fine line between benign aspiration and the destructive pursuit of an unattainable, unhealthy goal.
And sometimes of course there is no choice. The constraint is imposed externally – individually by the family or wholesale, morally, socially or politically, by representations of religion or the state.
My work explores these tipping points, using a variety of media to suggest the tensions: hard and soft; durable and fragile, enticing and defensive. These sculptures are derived from my interests in textiles and metalworking; and an abiding interest in ‘skeletal’ architectural forms that led me to look again at ways of creating freestanding, thought-provoking textile structures.
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Pursuit of the Body Beautiful | Constraint of the Body Beautiful