Beaded and Bruised: Balancing lace, lust and luridness through canvas

In the recent media landscape, being demure, dainty and perfectly skeletal is in and being a functioning flesh and blood woman is out.  

The expectation for women’s bodies to be purely presentational is ripped to shreds through the ‘grotesque art’ movement, which thrusts on display the wonderous horror of femininity.  

From Doreen Garner’s sculpture of dissected human carcasses to Kiki Smith’s sculpture of a women urinating — artists can deconstruct and challenge conventional standards of beauty in art, revealing a complex interplay between taboo, confusion and disgust. The movement is navigated by female artists as a ‘fuck you’ to patriarchal standards in art, portraying the shattered and disjointed feelings of womanhood. From Yoko Ono’s massacred remains of her black dress in Cut Piece and Tracy Emin’s period-soaked sheets in her sculpture My Bed, disgusting art that men usually hate is my favorite art genre.  

To broaden my understanding of the contemporary grotesque art movement, I sat down with Fine Arts students Emily Mahoney and Lily Hodgson-Bell to discuss their exploration within the genre. 

Lily’s mirrored pieces Wink, runner-up of Massive’s Masterpiece Competition, are two acrylic paintings that explore themes of sexiness, humour and reclamation. The mirrored female torsos are seductive with a hint of crudeness and whimsy. Almost identical, the two paintings are differentiated by a cheeky beaded eye.  

After a longer look, I realised I was actually being winked at. 

Lily explains to me, “The eyes are about the power dynamics between painter, viewer, and the male gaze. Giving body parts eyes is giving them power and agency over the viewer. The piece is inviting you to look at it whilst being playful and flirty, but also, it's looking back at you on equal playing fields.”  

Lily says that her artistic exploration of femininity derived from her tumultuous relationship with femininity growing up as tomboyish. “It's sort of reconciling all the non-feminine parts of myself and showing that they can be all that and at the same time and have equal value.” 

When it comes to artist Emily, she is a mostly sculpture-focused artist concentrating her works on the comfortability in femininity. She tells me, “A big part of my work is making people uncomfortable but in a purposeful way and making them question why they are uncomfortable.”  

Emily recently showcased her work in a third-year exhibition, The Delicate and Visceral, in which she showcased beautiful creations dripping in lace and flesh.  

The cover of the magazine this week, Self Portrait is a painted canvas overlaid with stretched nylon stockings. The blue and pink veins popping out under the nylon connect the feminine and non-feminine parts of the artist, blending as one to create her own identity.  

Emily’s artworks evoke unease and discomfort, yet the veins and lace remind me of the hidden stretches and intricacies in my own body that I don’t allow others to see.  

Though differing in style, Emily and Lily create art that represents femininity in both a gross and delicate way.  

Lily says, “Sometimes I feel like a weird little creature, and I want to portray that in my art. Like I have sharp teeth and sharp nails and am consuming a corpse.” 

“We are taught the blood and the guts, and the aggression is not what we would feel.”  

Emily poses the question: Why are naked female bodies shown in a non-sexual not considered feminine? 

Beneath the lace and ribbons there is beauty in the ‘gross’. Emily says, “Blood, anger and prettiness all come together in the same person at the same time.” 

When I noticed that both artists work with beading and physical elements over acrylic paint on canvas, I queried why beads and thread are layered over the paint.  

Lily explains, “Thread and beads can occupy, like myself, a both delicate and gutsy sort of realm. Thread can either be controlled and pretty or it can be coming out of the canvas like hair and arteries.” 

She adds that the art of textiles, once an honored profession for its often tedious and delicate skill, has lost value in recent times. Lily says, “It's been progressively devalued and labeled a hobby that old ladies do, so it's not art. I’m trying to bring the historically feminine practice into my art and value it as the same as painting.” 

Emily adds, “There was a point in time where young girls wouldn't learn math and science, they would learn embroidery and that was highly regarded.”  

Seeing their multi-dimensional view on womanhood, I asked about their personal connection between their work and their own femininity. 

Lily says that her art is a reclamation, that everything can be feminine not just the ‘beautiful’ cherry-picked aspects of female identity. “The stereotypical view of what a woman is like being pretty, dainty, lacy and soft. Those aren't bad, it's just a problem when it's presented as the only option when so many other things come up in everyone naturally.” 

We all laugh as Lily brings up a post she saw on Tumblr that inspired her feelings towards internalised misogyny. “I saw this Tumblr post that said the reason girls have an ‘I’m not like other girls’ phase is because we are taught that girls are shallow and vapid with no thoughts and feelings. So, we think we are different because we have independent thoughts and multitudes, but we are not taught that every other woman also has that”. 

Emily and Lily walk out of the interview in separate directions with separate art and experiences, but a shared desire to represent their own femininity beyond the realm of comfortability and the male gaze.