Monster
Multimedia by Krista Bailie
(click to enlarge images)
Krista Bailie
Monster, 2014
Paper, monofilament, acrylic, masking tape
“The pregnant body is not one vulnerable to external threat, but actively and visibly deformed from within. Women are out of control, uncontained, unpredictable, leaky: they are, in short, monstrous.” – Margrit Shildrick
This work attempts to revisit Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that women are perceived as too messy, too complicated and too scattered in their priorities to attain true dominance in the world, redirecting the conversation into the rejection of the maternal and more largely the artist-mother in contemporary art. This piece gently references the subversion present in Eva Hesse’s sculptural forms and was created by destroying art history textbooks, ripping them into strips and spinning them into yarn which was crocheted into a large form, signaling the female body and also using the ubiquitous crocheted grocery bag as a representation of the perceived banality of motherhood.