the violent feminine : a ventilation of clothed trauma
Tax Return [Iteration Three] and Subtotal Tax my resolved works as part of the 2025 gradshow, operate as mediations between material and body, externalising, inferring, and abstracting the female form through objects that hold, restrict, and sustain. Across both works, the body is foregrounded as a site of negotiation between tension, vulnerability and agency, positioning precarity as a metaphor for female existence and performance within the self-defined framework, the violent feminine. Mundane gestures and materials are transformed into sculptural and performative interventions that critique how femininity is constructed through policed forms of domestic, emotional, and symbolic labour. Oscillating between legibility and ambiguity through materiality and coded symbols, the works invite the viewer to navigate what can be read and what remains withheld. Through this process, fracture and reclamation are held as interdependent facets of the embodied feminine.
These pieces arise from my broader practise, which is guided by the violent feminine, a framework understood as the coexistence of oppositional forces within the female experience. Grounded in trauma theory and feminist discourse, my practice engages intimately with gendered experience, tracing how such traumas contour and reconfigure the architecture of the corporeal and affective body. To produce works functioning as confessional and archival sites, dwelling within spaces of rupture and recovery. Resisting resolved or conventional narratives, instead shifting articulation of female trauma as a form of agency, anchored in an internal negotiation between legibility, obscuration, and the autonomy to determine their balance.
