Larissa Esvelt

When your body and your skin become a guise, a surface to satisfy and seemingly hide all else, 

Why not pretend for a moment or a while, to be just that which you appear to be?

The costume slips over my skin, it fits so well. I think I’m quite the sight!

For the idea(l) of femininity is what I choose to wear,

Its complexity is one I understand and can romanticise, without a worry or a doubt. 

The fantasy feels almost real, the borders start to blur.

Until comfort is all I’ve ever known, submerged too deep for safe return.

It would be a lie if I told you 

I do not particularly see

The appeal, nor the mystery

Of being a woman. 

And for that to be the end of it.

The bath is an installation consisting of multiple sculptures and tapestries. Placed on a platform covered in ceramic tiles, the sculptures invite the viewer to enter the imaginary space of the public bath. Female figures bathe among each other, a space both private and public. Under the gaze of the viewer a place of comfort becomes one of discomfort, or perhaps the uneasiness was there all along.

The sculptures on view in the installation will be the bath; a tufted tapestry depicting 4 women as they take on classical poses, their hair overflowing their faces and Bending over backwards, a sculpture presents an equally colourful woman, bending over in a rather strange position as water flows over her face and platinum blonde hair.

The work ask the question where our idea of a female or feminine identity merge from reality into fiction, from our actual lived reality into our imagination. How do the female bodies affect a space, pretty but exposed , attractive and repelling at the same time. How do these idealised women relate to our own idea of identifying as woman?

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