Penny, Madonna/Madon’t, 2024
Bras, Textiles
This piece embraces duality; beauty and the failure of beauty. After surgery my feelings about myself changed, now one side of my body seems unfeminine, definitely unsexy, unapproachable.
In the making of it I discovered notions of good body/bad body, both in the objective sense; this breast is good/beautiful/shapely, this one looks bad, is scarred, misshapen, does not conform to ‘good’ aesthetic stereotypes…
and in the subjective senses of experiencing bad sensations, this breast feels good/bad to my touch, this feels painful, “bad’ inside.
This extends into ideas of my body being ‘bad’, doing something bad, turning ‘bad’ (like rotten fruit), behaving badly (virgin/whore), etc. There is no solution to these dichotomies, I have expanded in my capacity, to hold these dualities within, both realities exist at once on and within my flesh.
© Penny Wright, 2024
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