Bowtie and Rosebud have been featured on BBC documentary “100 Vaginas”

Embroidered Vulvas: Bowtie, Mother of Pearl, Rosebud

Timber Embroidery Hoop, white cotton fabric, embroidery floss, button.

5 in. diameter

2018

My research began with Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, that highlights female achievement in Western history to a heroic scale traditionally reserved for men. Each plate features an image based on the butterfly, symbolic of a vaginal central core. Each place mat contains one of the names of the 39 women and contain images drawn from each one's story, executed in the needlework of the time in which each woman lived. I became fascinated in the themes of the vagina as a tool of female empowerment and the ultimate embodiment of individuality in each plate. In the 21st century, women’s accomplishment is nothing new, women are being impowered. However, in 1979, when The Dinner Party debuted, shifted the cultural norms of femininity:

“When Judy Chicago began thinking about The Dinner Party in the late 1960s, there were no women's studies programs, no women in history courses, no seminaries teaching about the female principle in religion, and scarcely any women leading churches. There were no exhibitions, books, or courses surveying women in art. Not one woman appeared in the standard art history college textbook by H.W. Janson. There was no biography in English of Frida Kahlo; the music of Hildegarde of Bingen had not been heard for centuries.

It was more than news—it was a major challenge to academic and artistic tradition that the subject matter of women's achievements was adequate for a monumental work of art. Developing this subject matter, expressing it traditionally—i.e., on a heroic scale—in media that were considered beneath the standard of fine art, working openly with scores of studio participants and acknowledging their role in the production of art—in all these ways Judy Chicago defied tradition, and challenged the usual boundaries of the contemporary art world” (https://www.throughtheflower.org/projects/the_dinner_party).

Additionally, I studied Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings. I became interested in the shapes and colors of these flowers and how the link between Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers and the female genitalia became so strong that is unavoidable today. That might not have been intentional of O’Keeffe since she did not regard herself as a feminist. But feminists in the 1970s, like Chicago, particularly embraced this interpretation as they saw her works as empowering to women. For them, O’Keeffe’s flowers were metaphorical representations of female body, created in contrast to the traditions of female nudes painted by male artists.

My idea for this series came from an article I read that two-thirds of young adult females are too embarrassed to say the word ‘vagina’ to a doctor. I began to question this stigma, half of the world’s population has a vagina. Why do we feel embarrassed by this word? I began creating my first piece and purposefully asked others how they felt. I received a range of response – my mom looked at me like I was crazy, half of my friends felt uncomfortable, and the other half raved over the idea. As I started to make more and showed them to the same group of people, the responses changed. There were still feelings of unease but the repetition, the use of colors, patterns, and almost unrealistic form made others more comfortable. I incorporated Chicago’s butterfly and flower-like plates with O’Keeffe’s flowers to make my own vagina depictions. I used a series of embroidery techniques, colors, textures, form, and found objects. I depicted different representations of the female genitalia since they are all different. I think what is interesting about what I do with the medium of embroidery is that embroidery is thought of as extremely feminine and delicate material along with the images of butterflies and flowers.