The Angel in The House: an exploration of complexities and contradictions within contemporary femininity.
Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.
- Andrea Dworkin (1981: 481)
Through a materially sensitive and introspective approach, I investigate the inherited rituals and quiet violence’s of gendered experience, drawing on personal history, feminist theory, and intergenerational storytelling. Much of my work is informed by the women who have shaped my life, particularly my late Nanna, and the tensions between tenderness and strength, visibility and suppression, care, and sacrifice. Using oil paint and fibre-based materials, my work navigates the complexities of contemporary womanhood, centring the domestic as both a physical space and a symbolic site of emotional endurance. My current body of work, The Angel in the House, is a deeply personal feminist inquiry into how women carry, conceal, and express their inner worlds – wrapping grief in red lipstick, ambition in quietness, rage in care. Through soft sculpture and painting, I give material form to the invisible burdens of womanhood, honouring both what is passed down and what must be let go.
@milliehopton
milliehopton.art@gmail.com