Her
Photographic Series, 2022
Artist’s Statement
My photographic series, Her (2022) traces the invisible, taboo processes involved with being a biological woman in the Modern world. Inspired by Judy Chicago’s installation ‘Menstruation Bathroom’ (1972) it attempts to make the unseen seen, bringing out from public peripheral the sanitary products women use monthly and projecting the cultural beliefs of sordidity onto them. The juxtaposition between the sterility of the white bathroom Chicago presents and the saturation of a bin full of bloody tampons underlines the shame weighed upon the female body when puberty is thrust upon her and must be ‘hidden behind a locked bathroom door.’ (Gerhard, 2011)
Tampons have historically been a subject of critique. While for women’s hygiene, their phallic shape and destination to the woman’s vagina raised questions regarding the obstruction of female virginity. This raises questions of ownership – who owns the female vagina? Why should this even be a question? It implies that this female domain is the object of a man’s.
Issues such as the tampon tax, period poverty, the critique of Grace Tame regarding Scott Morrison and Instagram’s censorship of Rupi Kaur’s menstruation photos underline gender inequalities and highlight the need to voice issues that are needed, not that provide comfort. My work attempts to romanticise this idea through subtle layers of black and white that hover and swirl around the tampon’s movement. In doing so, the work formulates a love letter to being a woman and underline that the process of menstruation is intrinsic to being any biological female human. Sanitation is a human right, and to apply that right exclusively to the male is to deny that women are human.
