`Ripe` goes public

The 2018 annual exhibition of The Association of Victorian Sculptors was held August 6-24, and `Ripe` was seen in public for the first time. `Ripe` is my first sculpture cast in bronze. There were 120 sculptures on display in the grand foyer of 600 Bourke Street, Melbourne. Before the opening however , the trustees of the building asked me to change the name of the sculpture, which really shocked me. I believe this gross conservatism was an attempt at censorship and of course refused. They did not mind that my piece represented female fertility, and referred to the Venus of Willendorf made 30,000 BCE, a sculpture of a curvaceous female form and the oldest and most complete example of Paleolithic art. Ripe is overall a celebration of womanhood and naturally refers to the beauty of her form and the desire she provokes, albeit with exaggerated hips, and breasts in place of a head. Art historian LeRoy McDermitt says that `the first tradition of human image-making probably emerged as an adaptive response to the unique physical concerns of women and that, whatever else these representations may have symbolised to the society which created them, their existence signified an advance in women's self-conscious control over the material conditions of their reproductive lives.` (Current Anthropology, 1996, University of Chicago Press). So lets continue the tradition started 30,000 years ago and control our bodies and all representations of them.