'Under the Thumb'
Jessica’s work explores the duality of the female experience by looking at the physical to portray the internal. The imagery of the skin being grabbed and pulled at represents the male gaze and its entitlement over women and their bodies, and conveys the pain of being controlled my men’s desire. As a woman, it can feel as though your body is not your own, which it is, but the pressure to be or look a certain way in order fit the patriarchal beauty standards, leads to a complicated perception of femininity. If a woman is modest and reserved she’s a ‘prude’ but if a woman is open with her sexuality, she is a ‘whore’. She can’t win, and it is this language men use to talk about women that has really fuelled a passion in Jessica for equality, and she has used her own experiences with this misogynistic language as the text that overlaps her drawings. The quotes she has recorded are centred around sex and a man’s seemingly unspoken right to a woman’s body, which is the focal point of her work. She opted for graphite pencil to create her works as she wanted them to be as detailed and as realistic as she could get them, so upon viewing it would be as if actually looking at a body being handled in an aggressive manner, and not a depiction of. It’s the control a man has over a woman’s body, that Jessica’s work really aims to represent.
The hand and it's grip is a metaphor for the aggressive and dominant nature of men and their desire to take control over women, most specifically their sexuality.
Below is Jessica's studio in the whilst in the midst of creating her drawings.
It is the quotes used in Jessica's work that really aids in propelling the shocking true nature of misogyny forward. All material used are either things she has heard said to her, about friends or experiences people close to her, acting as a kind of wake-up-call. Twisted things like this are still said, despite seeming as a much more equal society, which upon realising this the viewer should feel saddened and repulsed.
This is Jessica's final composition for her show, all three large completed drawings, with her own experience with being objectified in her place of work, layered over the top.
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