Nemesis She, 2019

This is my body of thesis work, Nemesis She. I worked on this project from September to about mid-December of 2019. It's a deeply personal project that helped me express a lot of emotion that I don't often do in my work, and although my relationship to the topics I discuss in this project have changed since, I still have a lot of love for the work I did here. My relationship to femininity and gender, at the time of writing this post, has softened some and departed from the intense binary that I once felt, which was part of what drove me to create this work at the time. Looking back, it came from a place of venomous anger for the bonds of womanhood and stubborn passion I had for finding a way to break them for myself, which I have now shed in releasing myself from the need to be completely a "woman". I am a woman, but my definition and understanding of the term, for others and for myself, has broadened considerably and I no longer feel so tightly bound by my gender. Cheers to healing and personal growth. 

I created a total of 8 pieces for the project, 5 illustrations, a swords, and a pair of twin handbound books that include my process and the writing I did to accompany the work. I will attempt to present it here, similarly to how I do in the books. Enjoy.

For all the women who find kinship in rage.

Thank you to my family and friends, your immeasurable support means the world to me. 

This body of work is an attempt to unpack some of the complexities of womanhood. There are a great number of ways to feel about being a woman, but I find myself feeling enraged more than anything else. It is infuriating to have spent my whole life becoming a woman in the way I want to be, and to be told that I am not doing it right. To experience archaic patriarchal customs that have survived in the insidious tradition of oppression, resulting in a modern culture that systematically marginalizes women simply for being women. Despite my best efforts, I still find myself affected by the societal standard that women are less than men. My femininity is a source of personal power and I love it deeply. I feel fury when it is disallowed by others without invitation, interpreted as incorrect because they are uncomfortable.

I do not exist for you and I will not apologize for my wrath.

​Femininity nurtures an unassuming strength, forged by centuries of persistent injustice, assigned fragility and submissiveness that is expected of women. Power that is expressed through both peaceful and destructive means, through both diplomacy and chaos. The women who weaponize this strength and break the societal bonds so carefully crafted for them, have existed throughout history, standing out for their stunning brutality as members of the “fairer” sex. Women of power and violence, who did not stand blindly for the virtues of men, who acted upon the ferocity of their own will and femininity. I decided to study these women and some of the reactions to their recorded actions, including poetry and historical accounts. Provocative history and colorful literature provide imagery of women who upstaged traditional expectations of “the fairer sex”, without losing sight of their femininity. My work, in reaction to these accounts explores femininity and its relationship these themes.

Earthly Rage
18 x 24 in.
Mixed media painting. Graphite, digital print, gouache, marker.

“What sense of shame can be found in a woman wearing a helmet, who shuns femininity and loves brute force...If an auction is held of your wife’s effects, how proud you will be of her belt and arm-pads and plumes, and her half-length left-leg shin-guard! Or, if instead, she prefers a different form of combat how pleased you will be when the girl of your heart sells off her greaves! Hear her grunt while she practices thrusts as shown by the trainer, wilting under the weight of the helmet.” 
— Roman satirist Juvenal, on women who chose to cast off the expectations of Ancient Roman womanhood, and fight as gladiators in the arena alongside male fighters (1st/2nd century CE).

What pure ignorance must be possessed by one who does not see that femininity is a force more brutal than any other… a force that wages a ceaseless war against unrelenting oppression. If auction is held of your values, how proud you will be of your misogyny and false sense of superiority! Or, if instead, you prefer combat, how pleased you will be to learn that you are the very adversary that femininity hunts so deftly. You will surely hear her when she crushes the spine of your ideologies, with the same strength and power of will you have spent so long denying.

Colosseum
18 x 24 in.
Mixed media painting. Graphite, digital print, gouache, marker.

Submission and servitude are assumed of me, as a woman. I am to be complacent so those around me feel comfortable, and expected to give up my body for others, as my presumed role is that of an object. A child bearing conduit. A body without a consciousness. A piece of meat. Born to serve my purpose and be who and what I am told to be, because I am a woman.

Despite this, I stubbornly follow the path of those women before me who have risen above their supposed place in society and taken matters into their own hands. Women who have asserted their power into a world deemed unfit for them. Joan of Arc, the Dahomey Amazons, Queens Boudica and Arawelo, Tomyris, the Gladiatrix, Tomoe Gozen; all women remembered for upending the perception of their function in society and proving the power of their femininity. These women of history are accompanied by women of myth, living in legends that tell of their strength and ferocity, unleashed upon those who have wronged them. Morrigan, an Irish triple goddess, Athena, Nemesis, the Amazons and the Furies of Greek myth, Ishtar, Sekhmet from Egyptian mythology, Izanami no mikoto, Tiamat, the Hindu goddess Kali, Papatūānuku, Mami Wata, the Valkyries of Norse lore – all worshiped for their individual power, power that is inseparable from their womanhood.

​Pieces of Meat
18 x 24 in.
Mixed media painting. Graphite, digital print, gouache, marker.

​After centuries of women who have lived and died, fighting in the face of prejudice, women are still bound by the cultural perception of what they should be. Never have I been considered free from the function of my womanhood and as a result, I find it very difficult to separate the enterprise of being a woman from the adjacent idea that it is a violent one. How could I possibly be peaceful and subdued when I have had to fight tooth and nail, so that I can be who I want to be? Am I not a woman if I am not the things that others have told me to be? If I disobey? Why am I made to fight to define my femininity as my own, to be a woman the way I choose to be, and not as I am told to be? I am filled with a fury, coiled in my belly like a red hot snake, growing every day I face this question. I am enraged that my being is not accepted for what it is, but questioned and redefined by others.  

Wrath of the Iron Maiden
18 x 24 in.
Mixed media painting. Graphite, digital print, gouache, marker.

​My determination to dismantle the prejudices I face as a woman has produced a fascination with the women before me and alongside me, who have cut through the bonds they were born into. The women who have laid in wait, playing their role for hundreds of years, feeding the feminine beast as she prowls, cunning and fierce, in the shadow of oppression and preconceptions.

​Sentinel
18 x 24 in.
Mixed media painting. Graphite, digital print, gouache, marker.

Traditionally bladesmithing has been a masculine craft, practiced by men who create weapons and tools to be wielded by men with the purpose of asserting masculine power and dominance. Bladesmithing is an unlikely source of femininity, yet it has become part of how I define myself as a woman. I find a great deal of personal power in the art of making knives, in the processes and skills needed to make a great blade. Pursuing this hyper-masculine craft and realizing that it has become a source of my feminine power has transformed how I identify with my womanhood. This sword is a landmark in my learning about the craft of bladesmithing but also a great personal milestone in my relationship with my femininity. 

​Since I started making knives, the prospect of making a sword has been in the distant, dreamy future. I desperately hoped that one day I would be skilled enough to execute such a project, and produce an object that would bear my power. Not a masculine power, but a great feminine one, one that I have since spent years forging. No longer a childhood dream, this sword is representative of the definition of my personal femininity, an object symbolic of my power and my triumph in learning to love my womanhood.  

Special thanks to Malgorzata Zurakowska
and Matthew Hincman.

​Colophon

Copyright © 2019 by Claudia Martin.

All rights reserved.