BA HONS FINE ART DEGREE SHOW– May 2023

With a natural approach, I use the processes of old to create. Pilgrimaging to forage soil of our ancestors, specifically the Gabbroic clay from the Lizard in Cornwall. 

This locality of materials creates a communication with the land and history.

Building off historical mythologies and spirituality, I display a spirituality in our surroundings, not in deities.

This lends me to explore the connections and shared themes between women and the earth; cycles, rebirth, pain, pleasure, sexuality, sacred spaces, comfort and restoration, wildness and chaos. I use stereotypically masculine and feminine practices and materials, forging a new understanding of the processes. 

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EXHIBITION STATEMENT 

This exhibition is about the Earth…

About reconnecting to the earth with a feminine sensibility.

I explore shared themes between women and nature including their oppressed states in our patriarchal capitalist society. An issue of connecting women and nature being exclusive to the female sex, cements oppression to both. Yet, separating women and nature to overcome the issues of their oppression can actually solidify it because it reinforces the nature-culture binary and suggests that nature is not part of culture.

So, with an Ecofeminist core, that we as humans are an integral part of the physical environment, these issues of oppression are not just exclusive to women. Therefore, I explore a feminine connection to nature, not the female. 

This feminine connection is rooted in spirituality as a union of spiritual and material. The spiritual encompasses a feminine sexuality, sensuality and understanding of surroundings. The material being the earth and what we depend on from it. In Earth Womb, I use soil and wool- the basic needs of food, warmth and shelter. The soil is living. If we view the earth as living and notice how we depend on its diversity and the limits it sets for us, we can preserve life with the belief that everything is sacred.

The materials and traditional techniques I use, consisting of cob and wool, have their historical gendered stereotypes- ‘men build, women weave’, so, I intertwine them. These stereotypes and gender binaries should be broken and as we are all woven and interconnected, societal oppressions are also intertwined.

I use natural materials with ancient connections. Using local foraged clay from Cornwall, rich in its pagan spiritual history, and from sites that were clay sources in neolithic times. The process of foraging is restorative, creating a personal connection to the materials and engaging with natural surroundings. Rekindling the pilgrimages of collecting clay, rebirths the neolithic past and their way of life that honours earth’s beauty and raw materials. In addition, using traditional processes like pit firing, cobbing, natural dyeing and spinning wool, ties my work in a cycle defying categories of body, gender, history and time.

These complexities can be overwhelming, so, as we are part of nature not masters of it, I have created an intimate sacred space to be nature’s womb. Inspired by the Fogous around Cornwall, which are ancient underground chambers of unknown purposes but believed to be spiritual sites of rituals. They are womb-like spaces connecting Earth and spirit. So here is a space to reflect and connect, to connect to the ground and the earth where we are birthed from

My other sculptures share this immanence, search for wholeness and message of material connection as abstracted deities and unpersonified ‘mother earth’s’. With Immanence meaning being present and existing as a natural permanent part of something, they show this material spirituality, living interconnectedness and symbiosis with the earth. Also encompassing natures permanence and temporality, damage and strength, isolation and connectedness. In addition, they present taboo female genitalia as an isolated form, dominant, confrontational and invasive. Definitely not passive.

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EXHIBITION PIECES