A collection of female experiences

I began my journey by looking at my own female experiences and creating simple artistic responses in order to think about which direction I wanted to head in with my work.

I began looking at a recent experience of dealing with a miscarriage. Losing a foetus or baby, it was very early on, was hard even if it was something I wouldn’t have been able to go through with. But it was the reactions of people around me that hurt the most. My then boyfriend (21) refusing to come to abortion clinic with me because his parents said no. His mother yelling and berating me down the phone, telling me that I had brought shame on their family or that if he ever hurts himself it will be my fault for getting pregnant and finally that I am not looking after my body because I am not on female birth control, specifically the pill. I can’t go on the pill because I am prone to blood clots, but she didn’t care. This was so much more painful than anything I had gone through before. Not to mention the permanent changes to my body. My hips are wider, I have new more intense symptoms with my period now and my depression and anxiety worsened.
I thought this would be a good place to start for developing artwork on my personal female experiences as this experience was still so fresh. So I made a quick gouache painting to get things out of my system and to begin thinking about where I wanted my work to go.

I did a sketch with gouache and watercolour of birth control pills before writing on top the horrible phrase that was spoken to me; ‘You’re not taking care of your body’. It did feel good to paint this and express my frustration after keeping it in for so long and not knowing how to deal with it. I hadn’t done much work as I was struggling to cope but this piece helped me get back into the swing of things. I wasn’t sure if this was an idea I wanted to pursue so publicly with my art but it felt good to begin exploring there.

It also allowed me to begin testing out a new painting medium I hadn’t yet explored; gouache. And I quite enjoyed it, as it felt like a mix between two paint mediums I was already familiar with, acrylic and watercolour. I quite like the almost gooey texture and how well it works when thinned out with water too. It was something I wanted to apply within my drawings which would also help me build up to my next module: Painting 1. They have quite a similar effect as layering oil pastels with watercolour but less texture and less messy.

Collages

I wanted a quick way to explore other female experiences of mine and I decided collaging could be a cool way to do it and test out a new way of creating art. It would be like a visual mind map of ideas relating to my experiences. I teamed up with photographer Benny Chui to collaborate on some pieces, using his amazing photography work to explore my experiences as a woman and his as a foreign student from Hong Kong. And I really loved the results, it helped me explore emotions and feelings on traumatic or touchy experiences in a safe way, with the support of a friend as well (Benny was wonderful to work with).

For this first piece I channeled a lot of frustration over the Sarah Everard case and my own experiences getting home on public transport. I found that my Cards Against Humanity cards worked well in adding catchy or snappy bits of text that express my frustration and hurt on the topic. I really loved how this piece came out and that the monochromatic theme I stuck with just added to the effect. It has an almost ‘film noir’ vibe to it which works well with the narrative and theme I am trying to express.

For this collage I kept a focus on the silence surrounding sexual assault and harassment. Using flower images from postcards, containing a dissected fruit that looks like and represents female genitalia. I kept a focus on the silence of female pain and trauma, mostly by men. There have been so many times for me where my male friends have stayed silent while I suffered harassment and assault, mostly due to the fact that I am not perceived as theirs. This is a generalisation, but I have found most men only care about women’s struggles and accounts when its a girlfriend or a relative, a woman who they are in someway possessing. The amount of times guys only supported me when they expected more than a friendship to come out of it and when they realised I didn’t want that, just friendship, they stopped caring, some even going as far as calling me crazy and siding with the men who were actively hurting me.
A lot of this is also frustration from the lack of men speaking out on women’s issues during the height of the Sarah Everard case, a lot of men condemning women, calling them liars. This piece helped me to work through frustrations and express myself as well.

For this collage I circled back to my miscarriage again, opening up and expressing myself in more detail about the traumatic experience. I was left feeling silenced by my ex boyfriend, as he had asked me not share my experience online in artwork as it was ‘his experience too’. And while I agree he was affected and hurt by what happened, it was not his experience also. Not when he had a choice to come and support me, and he chose not to show up. He chose to let me go through it alone. So there was a lot of anger and hurt in this collage, which I explored. I am left not able to explore my body and this experience further in my artwork to respect his wishes and keep the peace, but I feel I will want to explore this in my work in the future when I am ready, as I am left still in quite a vulnerable state currently. I used lots of imagery of destruction to represent how my body has changed. My body has underwent some changes from the experience as mentioned when talking about my first piece. This was also the incident I feel destroyed my relationship, nothing was the ever the same after this. And I am relieved to be out of the relationship but the hurt from everything still lingers. And I hope the collage captures all of these emotions.

The final collage was done with Benny Chui as we worked over a video call to discuss his experiences with racism as a Hong Kong student studying abroad in the UK. It helped us to discuss traumas and experiences we’ve both went through and created a safe space for us to do that and explore our experiences with art. We both found an appreciation for each others artistic skills and worked together to create a collage that would help express Benny’s experiences as I have done with the previous collages. We worked together on the playing cards to create phrases and statements that Benny felt were accurate and true to how he felt. He chose photographs of his that he thought would help represent his feelings of isolation when it came to his experience of racism surrounded by a lot of white students who he felt would never really grasp or understand what he goes through. We came up with an idea of taking the image of the ‘Creation of Adam’ as religious paintings form the renaissance period often white washed these biblical characters that should be People of Colour, and we stuck traditional Japanese paintings over the faces in order to paint over the whiteness, which we felt was inaccurate representation.
I asked Benny for a statement on the piece:

“While the university handles racial attacks very well and try to include meetings with the victim as much as they can in order to let them keep up with the investigation with services available to the students, you never feel as safe walking down the street by yourself again. I feared I would receive racist remarks in broad daylight, let alone walking at night. Discussions with my international friends never goes anywhere since its just a group where we talk about our own experiences and racial attacks. Talking with my local friends rarely goes anywhere either since they are rarely the victim of a racial crime. Days and weeks go by and the numbers of hate crimes towards Asian Communities has not gone down but instead soars up in cases, knowing this makes me feel very helpless and hopeless. This feeling of being targeted, harassed and attacked solely because of my skin colour and facial structures never fades. My gender being feminised by western TV shows and movies made me realise that this matter could never be resolved.
It is nearly impossible to fully eradicate racism in all walks of life, it is in our human nature to investigate the differences between you and I, where skin colour comes as the first thing in our observation. Knowing the current matter could not be resolved in the coming decades, I decided to channel my feelings through the lens of my camera and collaborate with Simona Hopewell to express my personal feelings in an art piece, of which I hope my friends around the globe will find its relevance.”

What I’ve learned and my next steps

Working through on my thoughts, ideas and themes in bite sized pieces like these where I don’t have to think too much about drawing my subject matter and what composition for a figure I should draw has really helped me to think about my experiences, what I’d like to capture and how much I would like to expose myself within my work. I think with my drawings I’d like to keep a simple focus on my body and expression of my body and look into the female gaze and myself before approaching drawing men from a female point of view. I am not sure about being as vulnerable with my audience yet as some of the topics are still hard for me to approach in a more public space, but in a smaller, safer space like this, it is almost therapeutic to make artwork about these experiences.

I also enjoyed the new experience of collaboration, something I have never fully tried and I rather enjoyed it. Working close with someone like this helps create a safe space to discuss personal ideas and themes for art pieces where you can bounce and build ideas off of each other but also together. I enjoyed working with Benny and also seeing his practice and exploring it with him. It was also incredibly eye opening to learn from him about his experiences and also to teach him about mine. It would be something I am open to exploring again with the right person of course.

After exploring ideas and creating emotional, visual mind maps to work from with the collages I feel ready to dive in and begin drawing and expanding on my ideas and themes of feminism and the female experience in relation to art.