The Feminine, the Grotesque and the Reclaimed

In November 2019, Amiskwaciy Waskahigan (Edmonton) artists Kasie Campbell and Ginette Lund’s exhibition “Matrilineal Threads” opened at The New Gallery in Mohkinstsis (Calgary). Campbell’s sculptures were amorphous yet undoubtedly bodily with their pinky-brown-flesh-coloured fabric and stuffed nylon tights—a feminist fibre-art signature—which bulged out from the sculpture’s gaps and seams. Hung along one of the longer walls of the gallery were several knitted and crocheted sweaters Campbell made in collaboration with her mother, Ginette Lund. The handmade aspect of the sweaters implied traditional motherly care, but each had a message, either knitted into its weave or stitched on its label, that presented the less-spoken feelings of motherhood: “Too many mouths to feed,” “if only you knew,” “many sleepless nights.” The sweaters’ messages provided nuance to the psychological ties between mothers and daughters: simultaneous to the warmth of a generous parent and a sense of belonging within a family line is also a feeling of familial alienation. While they may share the experience of womanhood and family, a mother’s and daughter’s experiences of their own bodies and labour is individualized.

With other messages such as “loop us / loo pus / lew pus” and “my regret is not asking my mom how to make her peanut stitch,” Campbell references Lund’s passing following her 35-year battle with lupus. Lund collaborated with Campbell to create the crocheted works of “Matrilineal Threads” before her passing in May 2018. Exhibited in a gallery next to these sweaters, the odd and deformed bodily sculptures weren’t a generalized description of the experience of womanhood but rather additional supports for the narrative of Campbell’s own personal navigation of grief and its effect on the body.

Garner uses fabric and beads, among other materials such as silicon, glass, synthetic hair, petroleum jelly and rubber, to create bodily sculptures whose dismembered, torn and sutured appearances link repulsion and fascination. For Garner, “It’s not about creating a gruesome work. It’s about creating a work that has subtle nuances where you don’t really completely know how to feel.” The most disturbing part of Garner’s sculptures and performances is that, unlike other feminine grotesque works, the mutilation of these bodily forms recalls a historical fact. Unlike many cis white female artists, Garner doesn’t have to look to generalizations, theories or societal inferences of contempt for bodies that look like hers—she can draw examples directly from history.

Garner, Yeboah, Campbell and Lund are not making claims for a feminine or even cis-female identity. They’re not attempting to provide some catch-all statement or nostrum for all women, femininity or AFAB bodies. The roots of their works are their lived relationships, histories, traumas and experiences. This acknowledgement of personal difference is what enables their artworks to exist beyond a flat cis-feminist discourse, because they don’t rely on the audience’s mutual conclusion that the anthropomorphic figures are representative of a universal feminine experience. Instead, they emphasize that each individual’s experience of their body is a story that needs to be told.

The Western feminist movement, from first-wave onwards, has been rightly criticized for its exclusionary definitions of womanhood—including its arbitrary attachment of biological form to feminine expression—and its related injustices. I feel that the feminine grotesque has been similarly misattributed. At times, the genre’s artists forget that what might be a reclamation of ugliness for one person is violence to another, or that what may seem to be images of exaggeratedly grotesque bodies for one person is in fact the reality of the lived experiences of others.