From my reading up of the vagina Dentata myth I felt the need to interpret it in a way that I felt to be true and address my fear of women. When I think of women and relationships I associate them with traps and pain. This led me to think about using animal traps as a metaphor for the vagina. I went down to an agricultural store and found two types a mole trap and a gin trap. (see attached photos)
The mole trap when opened has a cylindrical gap with a trigger set in it. This looks as though it would squish and squash the penis and chop it into several pieces.
The gin trap is a much more vicious and snaps with great force, likewise it is hard to pull apart and set.
Thinking about inserting ones phallus into these and setting them off induces an abject feeling. I would like to use this to represent the vagina.
Using a chair as an interpretation of a woman because it suggests human as it’s created to support us. However I would not keep the chair in ‘chair’ shape I would bend and adjust it to hint at a human figure.
I wouldn’t want these traps just welded to a chair, set or unset and used as a static sculpture. I’d like the viewer to be part of the sculpture and participate with it – feeding the vagina.
I thought I would cast a series of hollow penis’s either cast from a dildo or just created in the style of a penis. The thought behind these being hollow would be that when inserted into the set trap they would set it off ad the penis would smashed into pieces causing delight and shock. The thought behind this came from apiece written by Laura Mulvey in ‘You Don’t Know What is Happening Do You, Mr. Jones’ in where she speaks about Allen Jones’s work being a stereotypical view the male subconscious uses to divert its attention away from the lack of the female phallus.
“The fetishist image of women has three aspects, all of which come across clearly in his (Allen Jones) books and art objects. First: woman plus phallic substitute. Second: woman minus phallus, punished and humiliated, often by woman plus phallus. Third: woman as phallus. Women are displayed for men as figures in an amazing masquerade, which expresses a strange male underworld of fear and desire.” (Laura Mulvey, Spare Rib, 1973)
The particular aspect I feel relates to proposed work is the first one. The woman being the animal trap, and the phallic substitute being the plaster penis.
