“Every day, girls face barriers to education caused by poverty, cultural norms and practices, poor infrastructure, violence, and fragility.”
I wanted to make work about the continuing struggle for woman’s rights to education. Adopted by the UN in 1981, Article 10 of the CEDAW (The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women) requires States to provide women with equal rights to education and curricula.
In Britain, historically, boys were sent away to boarding schools, and girls were kept at home, educated to become future wives and mothers to men. Even when access to institutional education was granted to them, they were subject to culturally dominant separate sphere ideology which influenced perceptions of “appropriateness” of education and vocational choices based on gender bias.
With the ever-prevailing existence of patriarchal violence and governance across many subcultures across the globe and in the UK, women are united in the struggles they face the world over and there is still a long way to go before we see true international equality for them. Linked to education rights, the resulting inequality of employment and pay for women in many industry sectors and professions are still under debate today.
In this work, I use multi-layered symbolism of objects and colour and relate its theme to historical and current constraints. I am particularly interested in ideas of protection, beauty, hope, equilibrium, and strength. Here, blue signifies accomplishing the impossible, fight against all odds, light pink represents admiration, the gradient tones of the portrait background refer to all the possible combinations of Melanin and Haemoglobin (Chd-Cm, 2021) in the human skin across the globe.
Chd-Cm, 2021
Emily, 2021
Project Installation Videos
Short videos of my project’s public installation which ran during the evenings of 28th to 30th March 2021
