Arts Thread

Hi, im megan a fine artist from wolverhampton university. My work is focused on investigating the crossover of femininity, desire, and transgression through mixed media paintings.I aim to explore how fruit, crochet and monstrous women can be symbolic of sexuality, power and social anxieties surrounding patriarchal power and women’s desires. Through these paintings, I investigate ways in which female sexuality is simultaneously celebrated and feared.Within my fruit paintings and my crochet , I focus on objects that resemble female form- the vagina, reproductive organs, and functions etc... whether they be decaying, bruised, leaking or hanging. These variates forms are metaphors of fertility, temptation, eroticism, and sexuality. Their soft, delicate surfaces offer suggestions of sensuality  and weakness whilst their imperfections and resemblance to women’s features hints to transgression, the uncanny and sexualisation. The fruit and the yarn acts as  a symbol of the social anxieties surrounding women’s bodies, desire, and femininity. Alongside these, I create realistic paintings of monstrous women  combining beauty, strength, eroticism, and horror. These women are purposely meant to be both alluring and unsettling, mimicking the tension between cultural ideals and anxieties surrounding women. Their features, gaze and monstrous attributes highlight sexuality, identity, power, and fear altogether: these figures challenge viewers preconceptions and original thoughts- revealing the truth of transgression, desire and societal control and normality. My goal within my work is to portray the monstrous feminine as something not inherently horrific and terrifying but as something complex, confusing but compelling and alluring. Like the taboo subject of women’s bodies, power, and identity, by combining fruits or crochet and female form, my paintings convey vitality, resilience and sensuality whilst also questions societal dynamics and patriarchy. At heart, my work invites people to reflect on potency of femininity, its seduction, its beauty, its ability to be uncanny or uncomfortable but to also inhibit the transformative power of desire and sexuality.