Second Spring

Aug 15

Written By Annalee Davis

Title
Second Spring (right and thumbnails)

Year
2019

Medium:
1. Mixed media & ledger pages on paper, 5’ x 3

2. Mixed media on paper, 5’ x 3’

3. Mixed media & ledger pages on paper, 5’ x 3’

4. Latex, ink & dry gold gouache on paper, 5’ x 3

5. Mixed media on paper, 3’ x 4’5 ¾”

6. Mixed media on paper, 5’ x 3'

Photo Credit:
Tom Condon

Collector:
Collection of artist

Title
Second Spring Studies (bottom)

Year
2019

Medium:
Collage, latex, pencil on ledger page

Dimensions:
Variable

Photo Credit:
Daniel Christaldi

Collector:
N/A

While on a Reed Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in the Fall of 2019, I produced a group of six drawings collectively titled Second Spring, to elucidate the shifting interior terrains in the post-reproductive female body. These large-scale drawings explore women’s embarkation into the uncharted territory following the generative stage of life. I wanted to ask questions about how our experiences with growing invisibility, shifts in desire, hormonal readjustment levels and increasingly androgynous states of being, impact our expectations of womanhood as we grow older. I was also curious to understand what changes manifest with this proximity to ageing and changing perceptions of beauty from one woman to the next during this evolution.

I think that patriarchal narratives characterise many women’s experience to the confines of marriage, motherhood, sex, and eroticism. These reductive characteristics extend to the framing of this powerful transition in misogynistic terms arousing anxiety, shame, and judgement. A lack of education around the metamorphosis that women’s bodies undergo implies that as older women, we are past a ‘sell-by date’, that we are no longer useful or valued to society - becoming ineffectual when our capacity to reproduce wanes.

The “Second Spring” series contests these entrenched fictions through an authentic and personal chronicling inspired by encounters with wildness, thresholds, intuition and alignment to spirit. The drawings augment a remapping of this unfathomable biological mystery, countering the intransigence of prescribed femininity, revealing a woman’s body shifting on and off plantation ledger pages. The woman wears Motherwort and Queen Anne’s Lace (both the plant and crochet). Post-reproductive breasts sprout Queen Anne’s Lace as part of this profound metamorphosis. In one image, she holds a powerful, wild stance as a multi-breasted woman.

On Being Committed to a Small Place

Parasite Series