Changing female body perception around the world through art…
Female genitalia have long been a source of fascination, recently of celebration but generally of confusion. Today it seems that images of the vagina are the sole preserve of pornographers, erotic artists and feminists. Step in British artist Jamie McCartney who has grasped the nettle to create a monumental wall sculpture all about this most intimate of places. For 400 women their privates are about to go public...
The 9 metre long polyptych (multiple panelled artwork) consists of four hundred plaster casts of vulvas, all of them unique, arranged into ten large frames. The age range of the women is from 18 to 76. Included are mothers and daughters, identical twins, transgendered men and women as well as a woman pre and post natal and another one pre and post labiaplasty. McCartney set out to make this project as broad and inclusive as possible.
The World Premiere of the exhibition will be in the Brighton Festival Fringe this May. The Fringe is the UK’s second biggest arts festival after Edinburgh. McCartney decided to have the launch at his Brighton studio, where the work was created in recognition of the people of Brighton, many of whom are included in the wall and have helped out during the five years it has taken to complete the work.
This isn’t just sensation, it is art with a social conscience and McCartney wants people to stop, look and listen. This is about grabbing the attention, using humour and spectacle, and then educating people about what normal women really look like.
“I realised that many women suffer anxiety about their genitals and I was in a unique position to do something about that.”
The Great Wall of Vagina, which appeared on Channel 4’s programme The Perfect Vagina, makes for fascinating and revealing viewing which is a far cry from pornography:
The brick-like grid of the uniformly white plaster casts becomes just texture from a distance. As you approach you realise what you are looking at. The geometry of four rows of 10 casts in each panel is repeated in the 10 panels. The solid aluminium frames, in contrast to the undulating curves of the casts, give it an almost architectural strength. That imposition of geometry on these simulacra of flesh and their sheer number and juxtaposition abstracts it from any notion of pornography.
“It’s time our society grew up around these issues and I’m certain that art has a role to play”
