cake crumbs, 2024, chewed gum (sugar free), tinfoil, canvas, cotton thread, oil paint, acrylic paint, scented candles, papier mâché, plywood, super glue, silk, gold star stickers, enamel spray paint, silica gel, plastic, machine stitching 

artist statement:

Pop culture zines Polyester, Medium, and Dazed have dubbed the last 12 months the 'year of the girl' with “girls once again ruling the URL world” (as Polyester wrote on their blog). The girl-related trends, expressions, and anecdotes sweeping social media appear to have been excitedly embraced, using the fluffy guise of nostalgia to remain largely unprobed. Perhaps there is something valuable in this Gen Z reheating of girlz rule, a forefronting of feminine experience in a bedazzled and girlypop-ified come-one-come-all girl power embrace. Certainly, a part of me longs to be a member of the love clubs of giggling (adult) girls buying naked Sony Angel dolls and complimenting each other in pookie speak. To embrace one’s membership in a club that fondly recalls trotting around in plastic Disney princess heels and hitting curbs with a ready squeal is a tempting proposition. But pastel pink quickly turns to red under a questioning gaze. Within this strange onslaught, I am overcome by an unshakable, stomach-churning, sickly-sweet bitterness. Beyond even the barely hidden consumerist consequences, there seems to be something vicious in the media resurgence of this rose-tinted girlhood. A poisonous flow between pixel, personal, and political. 

The micro-exhibition emerges from my visceral, gut-wrenching responses to this increasingly (binary) gendered social media context. The work is plastered with scrapbook kit stickers and seeped in sticky, glittery spite (born of deeply felt personal struggle and outrage as commonplace and insignificant as a vigilant duster’s crusade on under-bed dust bunnies). The work points to viciousness within choruses of I’m just a girl, and the rise of rinse-and-repeat rulebooks for the spectrum of girlhood. Pulling at carefully arranged croquette bows, playing with girl dinner, and dissecting girl math, loops of reason are worn down to their ridiculous cores. The micro-exhibition interrogates the IRL consequences of girlhood’s URL reign. The sculptural work is made entirely from chewed sugar-free chewing gum, a substance that is sticky and malleable and fossilizing – it holds the marking of teeth’s labour. Selected to arouse disgust, this humble material (employed by many to curb hunger during periods of disordered eating) corrodes girlhood’s paraded innocence with bodily crudeness. As a material, it is explicitly not sexual, but bodily markings and traces of fluids place it in a strange liminality. Crushed between the fingers, moulded and prodded it becomes a gut or vomit-like material that perhaps could seep through cracks in sugary sweet façades.