EMILY BAXTER

 With course chicken wire crushing the organic shape of the female form contained within, this project takes inspiration from Camille Paglia’s writing about an Appllonian society and where a woman's place is within it. Paglia believes that women are closer to nature than men, relating nature to a more Dionysian society and empires to that of an Apollonian one. The Apollonian society was one created by man to ward off the unexpected chaos from nature. It is the mask over our everyday life. One that is constraining us to a certain set of rules and ways to live.

    Thinking about how the Apollonian society hails from the grid architecture founded by the Egyptians, the use of chicken wire with its grid like pattern creates a firm and crushing material to represent this kind of society. The way in which the chicken wire wraps to create a linear, erect form takes inspiration from when Paglia states that, “Man is sexually compartmentalized. Genitally, he is condemned to a perpetual pattern of

linearity, focus, aim, directedness. He must learn to aim”. Thinking about man as the creator of the Apollonian lifestyle, the relation of the chicken wire to man is one of importance. Not only is it something created in man-made factories, but it is also is a material used to create order and section areas off into grids. 

    Within the chicken wire, there is a woman’s breasts being crushed within. From this bust, there is flesh colored paint being splattered. The use of the breasts of a woman was to represent nature itself. With the paint taking on the grid like pattern of the chicken wire, it shows how society brings order to chaos. Paglia states that, “Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature”. The female nature, or a nature of chaos, is something that is constantly being controlled by a society with a fear of the uncertain. This uncertainty caused by nature is represented by this female form being covered with the chaos of splattered paint.