Introducing my alter ego R.B.F. M’Powers:

Ties to Transgress

This artwork started with the object of a tie. I was thinking about what the formal garment might symbolize and how it might function pragmatically and symbolically. The garment is the raw material of the artwork that was undone and remade into something else. The activity was an exercise in undoing and transforming; the experience of making is object and process-oriented, including performance, representation, and experience. 

This fastener, the tie, strongly signifies a gendered identity.  It is worn, predominantly by men, knotted around the neck as an adornment to convey a sense of formality.  A very public piece of clothing that has iconic references to a sense of seriousness, respect, business - it can also be conceived of in terms of a visual reference to the phallus. I interpret this as a category of dress as having materialities through which we perform. Ideologies of gender have power over the public because they are expressions that concern distinct groups. I am interested in how subject positions might enable or create agency changes concerning patriarchal constructions of gendered stereotypes.

My thoughts on both power and transformation are part of the artwork's transformative process and the alter ego. It is my practice to embrace vulnerability as a methodology. It requires reflection and reflexivity, meaning thinking about what I have done and comprehending the subject of transformation that includes me as part of the content.

What did I do? I chose the material because I had already expressed in another artwork that I understood the tie as an object of relevance, a signifier of a specific state of being.

I unpicked the tie, I thought about what it could be, I thought about what kind of message or meaning my specific relation to power is. The action of undoing reflects my narrative. For a long time, 'Power' was the 'other' to me; it was not something that I could feel or possess or embody. I never had distinguished 'power' as something that could be more than one thing, such as control, authority, governance, regulation.

My thoughts about a tie as a garment are:  it is something that divides the head from the torso and limbs, it restricts movement, it can create a sense of physical and mental discomfort for the wearer of the tie and, the person witnessing or experiencing the message of the wearer. Formality, authority and, a sense of distinction are characteristics that I think of when recollecting personal, social, and cultural experiences.

I had recently read a novel Unladylike A Grrrl’s Guide to Wrestling (2019) by Heather Bandenburg; her story into feminism and wrestling. It's a beautiful narrative, and I only found it post my form of wrestling that I have been doing as an art practice I called Boxing. To paraphrase 'boxing,' I wrestled cardboard boxes to create interventions and sculptural forms. I used my body as the instrument to make changes to cardboard boxes in the form of physical contact.

Wrestling is an intense, intimate and, public sport where a certain amount of pretension exists. The transformation of my tie became my wrestling mask. I transform the tie into an eye-catching front that also is a form of empowerment.