The main theme in my artwork is BDSM, or bondage and discipline, dominance and submission and sado-masochism. Perceived as a social taboo, BDSM is considered in mainstream society as being negative and destructive, inflicting pain and violence. My work explores how BDSM can be a constructive way to create emotional and physical bonds and connection which heavily depend on its practitioners being safe, sane and consensual.
For me, BDSM is a way to desexualise the female body as well as acts of sexual pleasure as a whole. In order to truly explore pleasure, the female body must also be de-objectified. My artwork explores these two movements of desexualising and de-objectifying women and sex by finding beauty and creation in something that is deemed to be harmful and destructive.
In both my drawings and my final piece of four embroidered canvasses, the clothing is coloured in. This creates the appearance of the skin and body being naked and revealed in literal and figurative ways. The theme of creation and destruction is also suggested in the form of the embroidered canvasses where the act of embroidering pierces the surface of the canvas in order for the image to be created.
There is a purposeful contrast between the soft colours and the harsh black outlines in the drawings and embroidered works. This suggests a contrast between the social taboos that surround BDSM and the freedom to explore pleasure in its practice.

Creation and Destruction

The drawing section of this artwork consists of two series of line drawings that are linked together. The first series are line drawings of my body in various poses and positions while the second series are line drawings with cut out sections that look like missing squares which are enlarged.
The first series of line drawings unintentionally sexualised the images of the female form. I then created the second series in response to the initial drawings as the artwork did not do justice to the idea of desexualising and de-objectifying the female body. To undo the sexualisation I cut out squares from the original images and blew them up into their own abstract art pieces. This directly links to the overall theme of creation and destruction as the cutting up or “destroying” of the original images allowed me to create something new and still visually attractive. This also allowed me to explore the idea of freeing the female body from sexualised images as an act of creation.