Robyn Beeche Award Recipient
The Wandering Womb and Other Myths is a body of work that traces the historical pathologising of female emotion and the enduring cultural echoes of hysteria. Through photography, moving image, sound, and installation, the project examines how women’s bodies and feelings have been controlled, medicalised, and silenced. It draws upon the myth of the wandering womb, the ancient belief that the uterus could travel through the body causing madness, as a metaphor for displacement, rage, and resistance.
The work is both personal and political. It stems from my own experience as a woman and mother navigating expectations of composure, care, and self-restraint. In this project, the domestic space becomes a site of quiet tension, a place where care and containment coexist. Through self-portraiture, still life, and symbolic interventions with domestic objects, I examine the residue of emotion that lingers in material form.
The work looks to the body through the things that surround it, tracing gestures of care, damage, and repetition through surfaces that absorb touch and memory.Rather than depicting hysteria literally, the project seeks to evoke its presence through gesture, texture, and atmosphere. Sound elements and fragments of biblical and medical texts are layered within the installation, allowing historical and personal narratives to merge.
Ultimately, The Wandering Womb and Other Myths questions how emotion, especially female anger, continues to be misread and pathologised. It is an attempt to reclaim what was once dismissed as irrational, turning hysteria into a language of agency, memory, and embodied knowing.
https://stavlampropoulou.framer.photos