“Pretty Mint Dream Doggy” 

 

    For this project, I have created a piece that depicts my own personal struggles with being born a female. I suffer from a condition called Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. It is pretty much PMS but ramped up to have more pain, extreme ups and downs in mood/depression, and the feeling of being a zombie- very slow, tired, having no motivation to do anything at all. I wanted to create this piece because I felt like I needed to get out of my comfort zone a bit. I haven’t really worked much with the topic of ‘body issues’ or have depicted the more private aspects of one’s body in my work before. To be honest, I have been a bit scared to try. But now that I have, I feel a sense of relief, like I might be able to talk about such topics much easier now. The medium I am using is also a bit out of my comfort zone. I have worked with fabrics and textiles before in my off time. I have never before made a piece this size using only fibers. It was actually quite mind-numbing and fun. This was a very easy piece to work on while watching videos on YouTube. I feel like I might try and do more stuff with this medium in the future.

As the title says- this is part one.

    When coming up with the idea for this piece I intended there to be five different parts to it. Five different hoops depicting five parts of a chopped-up body. These will be in production sometime in the future.

 

    What I wanted to do in this piece was depict a familiar, yet painful part of being a girl- the period. Using different threads and yarns, I have created the bottom portion of a female body, with a prolapsed uterus and fallopian tubes bursting out the sides of the pelvis. This depicts the pain that not only I, but many other women feel every month.

    Whenever I see a feminist artist make a piece about this same topic, it is always done so in a provocative way- legs spread, vagina open wide with the woman’s fingers all up in that business. This is somehow supposed to be ‘empowering’. Sure, maybe to some women. But there are others out there who are having a hard time trying to come to terms with the fact that they have a war zone in their pants for about a week every month (me included). Through the softer colors and medium, I want to try to tell the message of “it’s ok to not quite have a grasp on how you feel about your body” as well as the message of reconciliation for those who have decided to tough it out.