A phenomenology of sexual difference in sculpture

This creative arts research project strives to materialise sexual difference in sculpture, through a phenomenology of materials and abstracted form, to uncover a potential new paradigm of feminist art. Drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray, this essay explores the lived experience of sexual difference through the sculptural installation enmeshed. Evolved from the lineage of Minimalism, enmeshed also explores materiality, decoration and the handmade. By means of gendered colour, pattern, and industrial materials metaphorically and conceptually enmeshed, the work explores surface, decoration and excess to posit an alternate, sexuate, feminist practice, challenging assumptions of what feminist aesthetics might be today and what would constitute a feminist practice.

wrote a Ph.D thesis about what I ended up calling sexual power dynamics in the novels of Charlotte Brontë. Sometimes I wanted to call it something else, something that felt more direct: BDSM, or sadomasochism, or kink. But sadomasochism, the term most critics who write about these kinds of sexual practices in Brontë’s work use, felt too specific for my purposes.Investments in giving or experiencing pain is just one of the sexual currents in Brontë’s work: several of the characters that I wrote about, and that I perceive as decidedly kinky, show little interest in pain as such.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License.

ISSN: 2202-2546

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