Post Reproductive Breasts Sprouting Queen Anne’s Lace
Title
Post-reproductive Breasts Sprouting Queen Anne’s Lace
Year
2019
Medium:
8 digital photographs
Dimensions:
N/A
Photo Credit:
Daniel Christaldi
Collector:
Collection of artist
This suite of eight pairs of post-reproductive breasts builds on the Second Spring series of drawings which elucidate the shifting interior terrains in the post-reproductive female body. As I continue exploring ageing from the perspective of a woman, these images reference sagging breasts in the older female body.
My own experience of increasing invisibility has been freeing. No longer feeling the need to be beautiful in prescribed ways, there is a recognition of another kind of beauty that sits outside the stereotypes women endure in order to conform to the status quo of what it means to have a desirable body. The beauty of confidence and fearlessness that many older women engender is empowering.
While walking on the ground just outside of my studio, I noticed the skeletal remains of a dried Prickly Pear cactus. It’s delicate lace-like structure and shape suggested the drooping form of breasts which have lost their shape due to less estrogen in the body. While many women consider mastopexy or breast lift surgery as necessary options to fight against or reverse natural changes taking place in our bodies, conversely accepting ageing and decay as inevitable allows us to push back against narratives that we need to fix our flawed selves.
These beautiful breast forms are sprouting Queen Anne’s Lace at their areola embracing another kind of desire - the desire for less fraudulence, more authenticity, fierce confidence and independence.
“The aging woman,” Simone de Beauvoir writes, well knows that if she ceases to be an erotic object, it is not only because her fleshno longer has fresh bounties for men; it is also because her past, her experience, make her, willy-nilly, a person; she has struggled, loved, willed, suffered, enjoyed, on her own account. This independence is intimidating.”
Flash Count Diary, Darcy Steinke, Canongate Books, UK, 2019. pp.138-139
