braball

This is rather a long post - I make no excuses.

Emily Duffy, the artist that produced the braball makes so much sense.

She says -
“Breasts are often a source of conflicting emotions for women. Our personal body experiences are rarely reflected in media images we see. A woman may feel ashamed, proud, annoyed, and sexual about her breasts during just one menstrual cycle, or even a single day. Almost every woman has a bra story to tell. Some are traumatic, others joyful. A first bra is one of our culture’s rites of passage for women, yet it’s often a secret, mumbled between teenaged girls and their mothers in store dressing rooms.

Using bras as an art medium (something I’ve been doing for several years now) is a way of disrupting some of the longstanding taboos surrounding them. It reconciles the narrow stereotypes of virgin and whore and fills in the true definitions of women that are missing in between. We’re old and young, tall and short, thin and plump, rich and poor, straight and gay, famous and anonymous, and every racial background imaginable.

The BraBall sculpture is solid bras, except for a "time capsule" in the very center that contains several pertinent items: documentation about my dispute with the other artist, one of my own bras, a scalpel, a replica of the Venus of Willendorf (one of the oldest known art artifacts - a plump, busty, female figure), documentation of my best friend’s battle with breast cancer (thank goodness she’s winning so far), a breast cancer ribbon pin, and a broken, red glass heart in a box. The last item is from a difficult therapy session I had several years ago, about being an incest survivor.”


braball