Wednesday 4 August 2010

Venus Envy

Sooo... major project looks very different since I last posted anything about it. Hopefully next week I'll actually have something tangible which is pretty exciting. Only 2 weeks left of this project. It's been a very long haul! Anyhoo, here's some info on what I'm actually doing.


What makes craft a possible site of feminist intervention is not only that its origins are closely tied to the feminine i.e. the domestic and the decorative, but also that it interacts with the hegemony of the capitalist patriarchy in a subversive way. Craftivism, the combination of craft and activism, takes place in public space in order to give visibility to a particular issue.
This project aims to marry traditional techniques in craft with feminist activism to question and disrupt the prevailing codes of mass consumerism. The conclusions gathered from Conversation Mapping research suggested that much of the prefabricated ideas of gender are created through mass consumer culture and advertising. In other words, they are capitalist techniques to make money on the insecurities among women that they have created.

The production of ‘false images’ is a requirement of capitalism.
- Kalle Lasn, Design Anarchy

There is a resurgent interest in craft as it relates to ‘socially engaged’ art and design practice. This project attempts to collapse the distinction between ‘making’ and ‘doing’ – the former associated with craft, the latter with human action...
In an attempt to undermine classical notions of idealized feminine beauty, Venus Envy is a series of manipulated Venus statues intended to subvert the male-defined notion of the feminine, which is beautiful, passive and silent. Each statue is based on a statement from the conversation map. The name Venus Envy is derived from invasive advertising and consumer culture that invites us to compare ourselves to others...


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