I never intended to cast people’s genitals but from the hundreds of comments the public and professionals have put on the website the need for this work is self-evident. It started in 2006 with a museum commission to create The Spice of Life. My models alerted me to just how many people secretly suffer with genital anxiety, but also how being cast and seeing other’s casts was so healing. A small social experiment followed that grew into a grand mission that became The Great Wall of Vagina. This world famous, twenty-six feet long, wall sculpture took me five years to complete. Its purpose: preventing the anxiety among women and girls that was driving so many to seek cosmetic genital surgeries for a problem they simply didn’t have.
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That’s the ethos behind these works. When you’ve seen what everyone else has, you’re gonna feel fine about your own. Used in multiple text books, TV programmes, sex education materials and by medical and mental health professionals around the world, this work is championed as a game changer in the battle to help young people in particular realise they have nothing to be anxious about. Photos of genitals will always resemble pornography and cannot be used by professionals easily. But photos of my casts are more easily accepted and can be used much more widely.
I term these works provocative simply because genitals seem to really trigger some people who don’t want to look. It is absolutely their right to believe that private parts should not be public and I respect that. I never exhibit this work anywhere that could deliberately cause offence. It is available to see online or in public galleries and museums, where the viewers have made a deliberate choice to seek it out.
Provocative can also mean erotic or suggestive, so you see I choose my words very carefully. The humorous titles of these works belie the important social messages they convey. Using humour gets under the radar and past people’s natural resistance to tricky subjects. They may otherwise think it is just smut but once drawn in I can bring the educational message to a wider audience who didn’t know they needed it. There is literally no point in playing to the gallery.
My move into making casts from the body began when I worked in special effects in the film industry in the 90s. Alongside the movie work I started doing private sculpture commissions using casting as a quick and cheap way to make a study of the subject. Over the years this developed into a successful side hustle alongside my personal art practice. That is how the museum found me in the first place and rest, as they say, is art history!
See the models page if you would like to know more about being included in my future genital artworks.
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