Shattered 2007

Five giant sized, broken and mended pots made in response to women’s accounts of surviving male sexual violence, 2004-7

The five pots

Princess Hymen is a response to numerous women’s descriptions of the pressures of living in a culture where female virginity is used to indicate both family, national and religious honour.

War Crime records, in text written into the interior surface of the pot, accounts from Bosnian women raped as part of the Serbian ‘ethnic cleansing,’ strategy. These accounts are specific but the crime against women is used in every war that has ever happened.

Traffic refers to the violence of global sex trade and its impact on women and girls exploited in prostitution.

Aftermath interprets materially the precarious nature of survival. Women mostly do not die from sexual violence but live with it. The survivor may look much the same on the outside but violation leaves a mark. Survivors are always vulnerable to further pressure.

Dancing celebrates the upbeat, optimistic times that every survivor needs to carry on.

I wrote the following, (edited,) in 2007. The situation is no better now, fifteen years later.

“In Britain we inhabit a society which has become far too tolerant of male violence and too afraid to name the perpetrator. We have a criminal justice system which has proved itself incapable of condemning any man who rapes. Shattered is an act of mourning, a memorial, [and] a protracted mending process … It celebrates survival, but it is also a call for action.”