The Room of My Own

The Room of my Own is an example of a body evolved into a new ideal. This form molded out of human hair on a steel frame is approximately 81” tall and filled predominantly with thyme as well as some grasses, cacti, and succulents. It acts as a form and a space within this future world contingent upon location but also with materials that are decontextualized from their location.Were more forms like this to exist in other climates, they would be filled with other plants and other materials. Named for Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” stating that in order to write fiction, a woman needs a room of her own with lock and key. This notion is complicated for me by Alice Walker, another writer, remarks on this essay and saying that if that is the case, that to write fiction women need only their own room with lock and key, then what is to be said of the poet Phillis Wheatley, a poet, a woman, and a slave, who owned not even her own body. The Room of My Own is a room within a body, a room that needs no other room. A refuge within its own form. It is a paradox of it being a living garden inside kept alive with a grow lamp and electricity and fossil fuels. It is filled with Thyme, which symbolizes courage, and rejects the white washed depictions of women’ genitals being soft and pink. The sculpture represents a relationship to the body through use of human hair and exists presently it it’s own form breathing through a yonic opening, it exists quietly, protected, not for you or any viewer to enter