AMATEUR was born out of my attraction to the textures, colours, patterns, and playthings of my early youth. In hoards I acquired baby clothes, baby blankets, and Hello Kitty merchandise. My thrift store spoils were transformed into a prototypical doll, roughly hand stitched and reminiscent of the rag dolls I cherished as a girl. One became many, each marred by suggestion of sexual utility. My desire to contrast girlhood and sex was innate — the two seemed inseparable as my adolescent experience left me sexually scathed and ashamed of my body:
Attention from older men felt novel at fourteen. I was beginning to resemble a woman, though I was still unmistakably a child. A twenty-five year old man kissed me with tongue as a thank you for purchasing his bands’ merchandise — I felt special. A girl in my grade had sex with a man in his mid twenties at a frat party. Lucky her, I thought. These incidences were common for my peers and I — they ranged from uncomfortable remarks from strange men, to full on sexual assault. At twenty-four, I am now only beginning to unpack the havoc these events have wreaked on my relationship with sex. I was moulded and weathered by adults who found my youth erotic, and it is only now that I feel enabled to confront these painful memories.
Through AMATEUR, I confront the emotional impact of sexual assaults I suffered as a teenager - assaults which were perpetrated largely by adult men. The series utilizes up-cycled fabric, magazine clippings, photographic portraiture, and poetry in the construction of needle-felted collages and hand-sewn rag dolls - each piece marred by a visual or written suggestion of sex and violence. The series utilizes highly recognizable symbols of girlhood such as Hello Kitty, baby dolls, Calico Critters figurines and teddy bears. These emblems of adolescence are starkly juxtaposed by embroidered sexual profanity and references to Pornhub and bondage. Dissonance between youth and sex present in each work, marks the horrible absurdity of posturing young girls as objects of forbidden lust.
AMATEUR is motivated by tender conversations between myself and important women in my life, specifically with my closest friends Vittoria, Carolina, Jaylyn, and Tatum. These women are recurring character throughout the series and have served as my greatest muses for the project, as it is our discussions of assault and sexual harm that have emboldened me to bare my wounds through AMATEUR.
The ultimate objective of AMATEUR is to loudly condemn the sexualization of teenage girls in contemporary media and in everyday life, and as well create a space where women may find inspiration in each other’s resilience. For in a world where the sexy schoolgirl trope reigns, and men foam at the mouth for the eighteenth birthdays of their favourite sex symbols, I fear for girls. I fear for my future daughter, and for every woman I encounter, as we all have, (or may have one day) our own horror stories to tell.