Gilding The Lily

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“It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present… you know what I mean?” Little Edie Grey Gardens

I was offered a pair of fake tits at fifteen. I opted instead to wear oversized water bras throughout my high school years to mask the shame of my disfigurement nicknamed sunken chest syndrome. At nineteen, I underwent a gruesome surgery that reshaped my sternum and lived the next two years with a titanium bar holding up my rib cage. The physical pain was excruciating however the psychological pain of suffering with body dysmorphia went unaddressed.

Two decades later, I am now free from the emotional dysregulation of my youth. I have far more insight into my personal history, the familial messaging of my upbringing and of our capitalist society. Our bodies, which should be sacrosanct, are corrupted by an underlying problem: the hyper sexualization of women and the insatiable consumption of sex. These gendered power dynamics have lingered through generations and often tragically morph into violence.

Gilding the Lily unpacks our collective hardship around unrealistic beauty standards and recontextualizes history to help us see how it keeps repeating itself. In many ways, this work is a rebuttal to kintsugi*. It is a testament to a shared female experience: being told that we are damaged or broken and need to reconstruct ourselves. This work reclaims our experiences, amplifies our voice and declares “we do not need to be mended, we are perfect with our imperfections ungilded”.

*Kintsugi is the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold — a metaphor for embracing your flaws and imperfections.

Exhibition at Blackfish Gallery in Portland, Oregon USA

April 3- April 27, 2024

Artist Talk and Closing Reception:

Saturday, April 27, 2024

2pm-closing

Foreplay:

An Immersive Culinary Art Experience

Hosted by Maggie McCloskey & Alice Christine Walker

Saturday, April 20th, 2024

Two dinner seatings at 6pm and 8:30pm

In a bespoke setting, guests will indulge in