The Blue Orchid

seashell, human hair, 10x10 cm

​

female body hair is one of the part of women's body subjected to contempt in society, a reason for shame and repulsion (we instigate young girls to shave their body from really early age because is told to them that is "prettier" for a woman). 

The prejudices that revolve around female body hair are demolished by feminists, who use to protest against this showing their unshaved body, as nature expects the female body should be.

This work is clearly a reference to "The Birth of Venus" by Botticelli, which involves the birth of the goddess from a seashell.

Here the shell is filled with real female body hairs, and it wants to eliminate the concept of shame associated with them: body hair are there after a depilation, and removing them from the body made that body objectively more beautiful, according to social aesthetics, but at the same time the same hairs are raised to beauty, being inside the seashell instead of the goddess.

On a formal level, the triangular-shaped shell with the tip pointing downwards reminds a female pubis, thus becoming an image of female intimacy, of which the hairs are part of: female intimacy is often still a social taboo, and pubic hair still cause real repulsion.
Shaving is a choice dictated by personal will with regard to one's body, and it is not a social imposition necessary to make a woman more beautiful.

 

(The work wants also to respond in an ironic way to the disparaging and often recurring saying about feminists who "do not shave", and therefore creates a short circuit: I am a feminist and I consider this as a feminist work, and to achieve it I had to shave, and so the myth is dispelled).