Alice Miekle: In Hatred and In Love
Artist profile 8
Much of contemporary grassroots feminist art is about aphorisms. Played out online, on blogs and social networks, feminist art can be vocal, unapologetic, and instantaneous — the daughter of riot grrrl, ‘bad girls’, and the cult of Tracey Emin’s bed. Within the online feminist community, the subculture of subversive kawaii has brought together the bluntness of Jenny Holzer with the aesthetics of Japanese lolita fashion, melding baby-pink and rosebuds with threat and violence. Keep your fucking hands off my body, says a charming, lowercase pixel font, bedecked with bows and gemstones. Silence is not consent, motherfucker, says another. It’s everything women have ever thought, coded in the visual language of dolls. It’s a slap from a hand wearing haribo rings. But like most reclaimed feminine mediums, it’s become commodified; fuck the patriarchy accessories are ten a penny on sites like etsy and tumblr. We’ve learned, growing up, to push away this side of ourselves, to forget about pink and glitter and One Direction because they’re dumb, and only girls like dumb things. It’s thrilling to see these aspects of femininity — however stereotypical and generalised — reclaimed, and repurposed, decorating bad words, treatises on violence, demands that cannot be silenced.
For a lot of us, though, it’s difficult to unlearn, and reconciling forgotten femininity with newfound anger doesn’t come as easily as a few flashing pixel .gifs suggest. The feeling is less rage, more ambivalence.
The work of Alice Miekle, to my mind, occupies this space between alienation from the feminine and reconciliation with it. It’s work of body and sex-positive feminism that suggests uncertainty of its own body and sexuality. Subversive kawaii says it’s not that time of the month, I just hate you. Alice’s work presents photographs of birth control pills and a mooncup, cut from their original context and pasted into a small pink zine. It says, this is the reality of it. There’s no snap judgement to make, no confrontation. Here it is, laid out for you to see. How does it make you feel?
Her work exists in the slippage between body-love and body-fear. In Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, Inga Muscio argues that women should reject sanitary products, contraceptives, anything invented by the beauty industry for women — because these have been masterminded by the patriarchy, and stand between ourselves and our bodies. The reality of it is rather more complex. Alice’s zine positions two statements side-by-side: Women are trapped. Women are free. It’s not a case of choosing one side or the other. Perhaps tampons were invented by the patriarchy, but what choices can we make in the meantime? Despite the anonymity of the zine, it displays a deeply personal response to a culture in which we’re asked to choose one or the other. Sitting alongside a pair of false eyelashes and a pair of stick-on breast enhancers, it presents the stuff of feminine life in the manner of museum. Whether you think women are trapped, free, or neither, will rely on your own response to these materials, what you know of them, whether you have used them or not. You bring yourself to the work.
We arrive at reconciliation by confronting learned, internalised misogyny and re-educating ourselves on our terms.
Cunt, a Declaration of Independence — Ingia Muscio
A similar ambivalence is explored in her work who told you not to like your body? A series of statements are presented on squares of white paper, tacked to the wall and top-and-tailed by strips of pink fringing. They read like diary entires, recording thoughts on the body. Some are more aphoristic than others; some are questions. I grew my armpit hair longish to see if I liked it, but I didn’t, so I shaved it off. It’s an old stereotype that when you become a feminist, you let your pit hair grow out. In the context of the female-coded body, this becomes more political than simple depilation. But it doesn’t settle anywhere, it just states a fact: I tried this to my body, and it didn’t work out, so I’m still here figuring everything out. How about you?
Femininity is performative. Stick-on lashes are costume. The breast enhancers displayed with the zine and fixed to a length of clear PVC, draped over a wire coathanger like a yoke. This piece suspends from a wall, or from the ceiling, like a garment for sale. It’s an invitation to try femininity on for size. Or at least one definition of femininity anyway. Because, as the honesty of who told you not to like your body? reminds us, nobody’s bodily experience is quite the same.
This ambivalence and duality continues into her sculptural work. Flannel face cloths are embedded in concrete casts, trapping the soft inside the unyielding. Towels are encased in mesh bags, their fibres poking through. Scraps of supple suede and leather are made into stalagmites, then arranged on the ground as if sentient, in a congregation. Nothing is quite as it seems, and the tactile is made untouchable.
Alice’s work may not be outwardly angry, or aphoristic, but instead it has a quiet, seething rage. It challenges stereotypes of femininity by presenting the reality of womanhood, the love/hate relationship some of us have with pit hair, birth control, and false eyelashes. By examining this veneer of femininity, and how it is performed in society, it questions the roles expected of women. It reminds me, in its own way, of the song I Wanna Know What Love Is by Julie Ruin — laidback as it seems, every line is laced with rage.
There is both hatred and love in her work, entrapment and freedom. Women are trapped, or women are free — what you make of this depends on you, and what experience of femininity you bring to the work. Alice, however, offers no direct answer: her work is a place for dialogue to begin.
You can see more of her work here:
alicemiekle-eca.tumblr.com
Text by Julia Barbour.
