MA Degree — pajnsy

My Fine Art MA ‘23 at WSA followed on directly from my BA, thanks to being awarded the Stephen Heffer Memorial Fund, as well as the WSA Fine Art MA Scholarship.
It followed along the same thematic lines as my BA, centered around my transition, with more of a focus on the assumption of a body that now correctly reflected my truest self, as well as finally being able to consciously live- I had been largely dissociated from my body since I hit female puberty at 11. The internal vs external became playing with realities of the body, and what counted as a body. Evoking the body can be as simple as a colour palette.
I got into large scale crochet sculpture, wool installations, and made a soft sculpture of my own corpse with too many bits and parts- the trans experience feels as though you have lived multiple lives in one. It is a constant process of regeneration, of adaption, and of grieving.
It is a rebirth.

The first room was dominated by the large crochet works, all titled “trans-” (tranfixation, transection, etc.) as a subtle nod to the underlying theme. Flesh tones everywhere, like the inside of a body.

Transgression, 6ftx4ft, Second-Hand Wool Crochet

Transection, 3ft wide, Second-Hand Wool Crochet
Fitted with a breathing mechanism underneath

Transmutation, 11ft long, Second-Hand Wool Crochet
Made by hand without a crochet hook

Transplantation, 4ftx3ft, Second-Hand Wool Crochet with Vintage Lace Doilies

Tranfixation, 5ft long, Hanging Second-Hand Wool Crochet with Vintage Doilies

The inclusion of doilies developed in investigating mediums with sustainability and textile history in mind. I took doilies, associated with church and tedium, and made them bleed, mutated them, turned the association with womanhood into an association with me.

Transfiguration, 14ftx9ft, Second-Hand Wool Crochet

Transition, Soft Sculpture with Crochet, Knitting, and Fabric Elements, Various sizes

The second room around the corner was sparse and barren in comparison, body parts scattered like the aftermath of a killing, wool as guts splayed around, soft sculptures strewn across the floor, bag of wool and fabrics in the corner like a sack of entrails.

Some parts were identifiable, some abstract and ambiguous, like a new aberration of the body. Half made and half unmade, stitchwork and knitting amongst the gore. One lone eye facing the viewer. Both bits of something dead, and pieces of something created.

I left the head incomplete, skinned, weighted with nails driven into a polystyrene base. It was shunned to the corner, facing away. I didn’t want the work to be a portrait, but I also didn’t want it to be a headless inhuman thing. It is a face without an identity.

Some of the bones had mechanism inside that caused cracking sensations when moved. The dead frog came about accidentally within the room, but added potent metamorphosis symbolism.

The skin on the lower leg sculpture on the shelf had velcro to peel and wrap the calf.

Some soft sculpture and some crochet, some just pieces of fabric and unspooled wool, made for a playfulness to the gore, things imagined and incorrect, shapeless like a dream. It gave an unreality to the work, something to be investigated and used as toys, yet the reality of it mimicking a dismembered corpse- then, the dark association with trans suicide and mortality rates. It’s meaning has layers like skin. Inciting curiosity. Likening the body to something malleable, exciting, and worth reimagining.

The caption for the work was: The person you are becoming is more important than the person you were before.

Other works from my MA include:

Skin

Cut

Decay

Rot

Tear

A series of 7x11” Hand-Loom Weavings

Wool installations, like the one seen in my Reading Exhibition in the Exhibitions section.

I reworked my BA chrysalises into new works, oozing beaded blood, or red insides poking out, more dynamic and revealing.

Studio shots:

There Is So Much of Me, 8ftx6ft, Second-Hand Wool Crochet, 2023- previously used in my Reading Boiling Point Collective Exhibition, but also in my interim MA show, with the caption:
The body can be evoked with just a colour. Is this a body? Is this an object? Is it alive?
What about you? What about your body?
The body is a malleable substance.
Do with it what you will.

A few other pieces including new mediums such as doilies, wool skeins, lacework, beadwork, and curtain ropes, that didn’t make it into my final curation: