Corners
Institution
Royal College of Art
Programme
MRes RCA
Year
2024
Location
London, UK
Series
Artificial Gestation Systems
Medium
Mixed media, sculptural painting
Status
Completed
Platform
RCA Research Biennale
Rethinking the Representation of the Uterus through a Sculptural Painting Practice
This project addressed confusion about female identity through painting; demonstrated the iterated narrative of the uterus in Western culture until scientific understanding became mainstream through archive-making; and through material experiment, played with the visual language they inherit to tell an alternative story of a possible future.
The research bridges personal experience with historical context, examining how representations of the female body have been constructed and inherited across centuries of Western medical and artistic tradition.
Archive of Representations
An archive of the representation of the uterus in different times and cultures. This section investigates how the uterus has been depicted across centuries — from ancient anatomical drawings to medieval manuscripts to modern medical imaging — revealing how each era's understanding (and misunderstanding) shaped the cultural narrative around the female body.
Imagery History of the Uterus
The representation as knowledge, knowledge as power, the river of past representations. This section traces how visual depictions of the uterus evolved alongside — and were often weaponised by — shifts in medical authority, religious doctrine, and political control over the female body.
From Vesalius to modern ultrasound, each new imaging technology reframed public understanding while simultaneously reinforcing or disrupting existing power structures around reproduction and femininity.
Thinking Fluid and Semiotic
An alternative way of representing the female body through fluidity. This section explores how material experiments — working with latex, gel, ink, and pigment — can bypass the rigid visual language inherited from anatomical illustration and create new, embodied representations that resist categorisation.
Through fluid materials that drip, pool, and set unpredictably, the work embraces the body's resistance to being fixed in a single image or meaning.
Soft Sculpture
Stitching, painting of medical images of the birth, visceral. The soft sculptures extend the painted surface into three-dimensional form, using fabric, latex, plaster, and thread to create objects that carry the weight and vulnerability of the body.
These works blur the boundary between painting and object, between representation and embodiment — each piece holds the tension between clinical precision and raw, corporeal intimacy.
