Her Wild Reflections is a digital print, film and sculpture exhibition which emerged from my Rising Residency at Jupiter Artland and was commissioned for Jupiter Rising Fest 2021.

 

Using Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves as a generative lens, the project examines the porousness of archetypal female narratives and the ways those narratives are worn, performed and recovered in the lives of women of colour. Estés’ writing insists that “Within every woman, there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force” a premise that allowed me to think of the Wild Woman not as a metaphor but as a living, mutable presence to be embodied, contested and hosted in site-specific form.

 

I worked with three people from my immediate circle, my little sister, my sister-in-law and a close friend, not as models but as co-authors of character. Each participant became the custodian of a distinct persona, a set of gestures and a mask, and each persona was given its own architectural home in the landscape: bespoke structures sited within the woods at Jupiter Artland that function as stages, shrines and breathing rooms. By giving characters built enclosures, I wanted to render the internal external, to make visible the rooms where private myth, memory and survival are rehearsed. The walk between structures becomes a choreographic dramaturgy: visitors move from chamber to chamber, encountering rupture, refuge, reckoning and play.