|Beyond Femininity| Essay by Mirabelle Field & Tamar Torrance
Read ESSAY by curators Mirabelle Field & Tamar Torrance on the | Beyond Femininity | group exhibition - on show at Northart July 6 - August 15, 2021
“When depictions of womanhood have acknowledged the realities of the physical female body, these realities have been considered transgressive, gross, inappropriate. As such, the idealised female body has dominated conceptions and depictions of women and femininity; while the actual lived experience of women has been disregarded as less appealing, less acceptable (and certainly less inviting). For centuries, this tradition taught women that the appetites of male observers were to be adhered and conformed to at the expense of their own experience; ensuring that the phenomenological reality of being a woman, the actual lived experience, remained censored.
In order to challenge this, women were tasked with deconstructing the relationship between these traditions of thought and female subjectivity, identity, and lived experience. One of the most important ways in which this cultural ideology has been confronted in recent years was through the creation of diverse representations of womanhood in the visual arts.”
Hope Nobilo, Mother of Me, watercolour and gouache on paper, recycled frame, 2021.
Image courtesy of the artist and Northart