Peripheral Permanence of Everyday Life

Artist Statement

My distinction project has been an exploration of the body and how it functions as a central point for how and why we experience issues of social injustice. The body becomes a vessel for carrying these resulting heavy experiences and a starting point for creating powerful solutions. With this project, I take issues of gender and racial discrimination in legislation and resulting politics and try to convey how intimately they can impact folks’ bodies. Oftentimes these issues are talked about at the surface level in abstracted ways, such that they become detached from lived experiences. This body of work specifically attempts to address the experiences of those who menstruate and use garments to examine the impacts of legislation on femme bodies. Specifically, it centers on the various ways society attempts to control femme bodies and those who menstruate. This control can come in many forms be it through financial ability, psychological control, and/or physical control via social expectations.

The garments act as surrogates for physical bodies and represent how society engages issues of bodily control through legislation. This legislative language exists in the world around us, but the ease with which we choose to disregard or ignore it causes its presence to begin to fade from our consciousness. Ultimately this denial of rights becomes written on us and associated with aspects of our identity. As a result of these experiences, we as people are then reduced to an empty shell representative of the injustice. The menstrual products are meant to be representative of the burden and the simultaneous presence of these objects in the lives of menstruators.

I want to create work that utilizes or stems from found objects but transforms them such that they are recognizable but become approachable enough for people to want to interact with them. I hope to be able to break down the barrier to these products and subject matter through an invitation to interact with them.