Bedroom Interior
2022. Plastic pony, fibers, clay, silicone.
12" x 5" x 10"
Masculinity, and my lifelong craving to be masculine, prompts me today to teach myself how to play with femininity. I spent too many years declaring that I was not like other girls. I did not understand that this does damage— and not the kind of damage that breaks glass ceilings. I thought I could wear this declaration like a badge; re-brand girl as tougher and with less feeling. Femininity felt vulnerable. What is the rationale around our obsession with power other than it being a survival instinct? My rebranding of girl has never sat right with me. It never made me become boy like I thought I wanted. All it ever did was put a label on femininity and perpetuate that girl is something that isn’t enough.
As a child, my tomboy self spent hours kneeling on my bedroom’s emerald green carpet. Surrounded by 1980’s barnboard accent walls, I’d watch my plastic farm animals graze on the grass-colored shag. Walking into my studio space today, the rust-colored clay and sepia photographs are delicately decorated with swathes of bubblegum pink. I have framed my studio practice as a place to honor my farm-kid roots, while I rediscover enjoyment in the femininity I shirked away from. How do I learn to love both identities? Is this exploration as an adult merely an imitation? Can you ever avoid role-playing or is it enough to be aware that it is something you’re buying into?
I created “Bedroom Interior” to manufacture a space that sits between yearning for this severed past and enjoying the adult version of it in this present life. I’ve been thinking about female sexuality, intimacy, and private spaces outside of the male gaze. The cross-stitched cowgirl nods to women’s work, where needlework would advertise to suitors a woman’s discipline as a wife. This stitched portrait hangs behind the horse, a child’s toy. The cactus-shaped sex toy, an adult toy, sits cheekily beside it. These objects of the home, when in tandem with one another, create a landscape.
