Bye bye bra...

The day has arrived! The bra is being burnt!!
To follow along the liberation of women part of my work it felt only appropriate that I followed in the footsteps of the women of the 60s, or rather their thrill of burning what defines a woman's body. It was oddly liberating to see what we have all worn for years to melt and singe down to nothing but the wires and few fibres that makes these feminine garments. Filming and photographing was easily the best way to capture such a moment, although if only there was something to catch the rancid smell!

 

It is quite frightening how quickly the bra's disintegrated into nothing! The fear of what happens being caught in a fire has certainly been in my mind today. But what I was surprised at is actually how amazing the bras look now burnt (well whats left of them). Now I'm going to patch one of the bras up with nice lace and such to create a contrast of the woman who repel the ideas of the feminists and those who joined in with the bra burning of the 60s

The protests!

While looking at the work on display at the Baltic I discovered the artist Maurizio Anzeri who mixes photography with textiles. He takes classical portraits and then embroiders over the top to enhance the images, as shown. It is such a simple idea but Anzeri makes the photographs come alive with this traditional textile art to create a very modern piece of work.

I wanted to try my own so found images of women protesting during the 60s. I found several black and white images with protest slogans wrote on banners in the images. I then decided to embroider the words, instead of the people, in red as many of the feminism organisations were wrote in red at the time. The end result was very effective as you immediately see what the purpose of the photographs are, the woman fighting for their rights to be individuals and equal to men.

What it feels like for a girl...

I started with an initial ideas page to explore various areas that I could search in this project. I like the idea of looking at the way women have changed since the suffrage and how the independance we have gained has in some way damaged us, with our self esteem and body awareness.

Many connotations come along with being a girl so I created a collage of words from the newspaper that summed up what women feel or words they are subjected to. From this I want to move on to the suffrage of the 20s and try traditional textiles such as tapestry or embroidary to link with womens past