2025

This City of Ladies reimagines Christine de Pizan’s allegorical city in a trembling, distorted form that interrogates the spatial and ideological architectures of containment that discipline the female body. Centuries after de Pizan’s pioneering denunciation of misogynist narratives contemporary imagery still confines women to roles of delicate ornamentation beside their male counterparts. These porcelain figures, though seemingly celebrating feminine strength, ironically underscore an enduring subordination by tethering the image of womanhood to traditional male-defined frameworks.

Inspired in part by James M. Smith’s Architecture of Containment the work gestures toward histories of confinement, from Magdalene laundries to the domestic sphere, revealing how state and church have weaponised space to enforce submission. Liquid seeps, plaster absorbs, light shifts – materials embody the tensions between memory and silence, control and defiance. Yet within these ruptured forms lie the spectres of resistance – cracks in the foundations, spaces where the constrained might yet escape.