works
project
wrong vessels
the perfect female
oil on canvas
illustrations
graphic design & art publications
exhibitions
press
xhyshavonne@gmail.com
works
project
wrong vessels
the perfect female
oil on canvas
illustrations
graphic design & art publications
exhibitions
press
xhyshavonne@gmail.com
Her work is grounded in queer theory, cyborg feminism and speculative theory. These frameworks shape how she approaches a set of overlapping questions: how female and queer identities are produced and policed, how technology rehearses and reinforces norms around the body, and what forms of agency emerge between humans and machines. Practice, for her, is how these questions get tested rather than illustrated; each project pulls in the material it needs, whether that is clay, fabricated sculptural objects, or systems built from code and hardware.
In The Perfect Female, she constructs a fictional biotech company, AnKang Bio™, whose body implants are staged as sculptural propositions. Adopting the voice of a product designer operating within patriarchal norms, the work exposes the logic of systems that encode control as care. Wrong Vessels, developed through her ceramic practice, embeds vulva forms into hand-thrown vessels and lets cracking, warping and glaze runs remain as finished conditions. The logic by which ceramic specimens are judged acceptable or rejected shares its structure with the disciplining of women's bodies. The project is now entering a second phase in which metal and kinetic elements are introduced, extending the work from the vessel alone to the systems that hold, constrain and act upon it.
Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London
2021 - 2022 | Graduate Diploma in Art & Design
Royal College of Art, London
2016 – 2020 | BFA Communications Design
Pratt Institute, New York
Last Updated 26.08.05
This ceramic series makes people uncomfortable on purpose.
Female genitalia are supposed to stay hidden. When the vulva becomes visible, it gets coded as impure, shameful, something that shouldn't be seen. This is a social discipline: women learn early that certain parts of our bodies must be concealed or we become "unclean."
I place vulva forms on ceramic vessels as a direct refusal of this rule. If discomfort arises, that discomfort is the point. It exposes how deeply we've internalized the idea that female genitalia are obscene while male genitalia appear on monuments, in art, as symbols of power.
The vessels themselves fall into the category of failed products. They don't function properly as containers. They leak, refuse to hold, crack in ways I can't predict.
I lose control over clay while I fire these pieces at 1200-1280°C. The clay warps, and glazes flow where I didn't plan. Forms collapse. Cracks appear. I set up conditions but the material does what it wants. This is the clay and glaze resisting me as a human trying to control them.
I see this material resistance as parallel to women resisting patriarchal control. Both the clay and women are expected to behave, to take the shape demanded of them, to perform correctly. When either refuses, the response is similar: this is wrong, this failed, this needs to be fixed or destroyed.
But what if the refusal is the work? What if "wrong" is actually resistance made visible? These vessels exist because I want forms that have been hidden to occupy space with the same legitimacy given to phallic forms throughout history. Not to reverse anything. To refuse the terms entirely.
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