JESSAMYN BAILEY

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    This year my work has focused on the corset as a metaphor for pressures placed on the female consciousness by both society and herself. The tight corset constricts around a female body using steel boning to restrict movement and create a rigid Form that no longer functions naturally but has now become an object primarily for viewing. Over time a tight laced corset literally morphs the ribcage and the upper body into a new shape by moving bones and crushing organs. The Corseted body can be seen in many different ways: as a sexual object, an iconic form, a trapped slave, a bound and tied animal, or a heroine clad in armor. Is a woman’s place here empowering or unconscionable? Possibly both.

    Increasingly I feel expected to conform to an unnatural and unrealistic body type or to feel shame otherwise. In the modern day “the corset did not so much disappear as become internalized through diet, exercise, and plastic surgery… the transition from the whale bone corset to the muscular corset.” In my corset series, a group of five oil paintings on canvas, I depict the corset as the physical realization of the pressure I and others feel. My body and my personal collection of corsets are used in my works to emphasize the intently personal nature of this cultural issue.

    In the Cornwall Corset series, a collection of 35mm pinhole photographs, I have freed the corset. It becomes part of the natural landscape. Fabric and laces become part of hill and trees or growing on stone. In this context the corset becomes a stand in for the female form and allows the camera to explore body as landscape. The pinhole allows infinite depth of field, unlike camera lens, which allowed me to push the near and far in the photographs to the extreme.

    For these works I continue to draw inspiration from Jenny Saville, for her exploration of body image. Other female artists such as Cathy de Monchaux, Frida Kahlo, and Paula Rego offer their views in my research as well as the feminist art movements. Hans Bellmer’s works on paper and photographs has also been influential. Finally, I have been looking at the history of the corset, it’s place as a garment at the height of fashion in the 1900s, a symbol of female oppression taken up by the dress reform movements, a form of body modification and a modern day symbol of fetish and domination.