Anthropo-SEEN was originally inspired by images of abandoned infrastructure jutting out of the side of a mountain. My subject stands in fleeting thought during a moment of her daily life. The structures are not adorned on her like clothing, but they are also not entirely embedded into her skin. The structures exist with her. This is where I hope to capture my viewer, to evoke a sense that the structures, like bodily appendages, move with the subject’s movements. I invite the viewer to consider themselves as the subject and imagine structural appendages jutting out of their own bodies, moving with their own movements.

Anthropo-SEEN also confronts the common narrative of woman as nature, or mother as Earth. The piece calls on viewers to reflect on this popular narrative and consider the parallels between the mistreatment of women’s bodies and the mistreatment of the Earth. Like the physical structures so mindlessly built on the soil, women also bear a disproportionate weight of violent economic and societal structures. This is clear across various studies of direct and structural violence, but the idea arose specifically from Carol Cohn’s (1987) discursive research on the use of phallic language and nuclear weaponry. Cohn’s work describes the way nuclear weaponry experts discuss the land in the same way they discuss masculine sexual fantasies. Her work echoes many feminist studies on the parallels between violence against women’s bodies and violence against the land. (Cohn, 1987) While I do not expect my viewers to make connections to these specific inspirations, I do hope to evoke a visceral sense of the body as inherently connected to both the land and human structures.

The above writing is an excerpt from my master’s capstone, Art, Peacebuilding, and Reimagining the Climate Crisis. Feel free to read the full piece here.