Autumn Hardwick
Something to Wear, 2021yarn, ( 20” x 18”)
Something to Wear (details), 2021yarn, ( 20” x 18”)
Bag, 2021
plastic bags, (14” x 18”)
Bag (details), 2021plastic bags, (14” x 18”)
Madonna and Child, 2021
yarn, monks cloth, glue, (5.5” x 8”)
Madonna and Child (details), 2021yarn, monks cloth, glue, (5.5” x 8”)
Autumn Hardwick
In my art, I am interested in exploring the ideas of femininity, gender roles, nonbinary gender identity, and crafts vs fine art. As a nonbinary person who was assigned female at birth, I still feel enormous pressure from the media and my upbringing to be feminine enough and in the ways society expects a woman should be. I feel like society puts genders in boxes with narrow expectations for how they should be expressed and that even though nonbinary identities are becoming more widely excepted, “nonbinary” is considered a third gender and just another box that one has to fit into to be seen as valid. I often feel like I don’t look androgenous enough to be nonbinary, but I don’t feel feminine enough to be a woman.
For me, I feel like there is a push and pull between femininity and androgyny. I don’t feel like a woman or want to be perceived as a woman, but I still can’t escape the pressures and expectations that society places on women. The pressures to be a wife and mother still weigh down on me. I still experience misogyny and share the experience of being objectified in the way many women are. With this, I also want to explore what it means to be a woman because it is difficult to define, but women tend to connect with each other over shared experiences they face in a patriarchal society. It seems contradictory that I can have so many of these shared experiences while feeling that womanhood doesn’t describe me.
I want to explore these ideas in my artwork first through using mediums that are traditionally viewed as “feminine crafts.” This takes on the concept of gender roles as certain activities are delineated as masculine while others are feminine, such as crocheting. Using these mediums also addresses the idea of craft vs fine arts. For centuries, women would practice different skills like sewing, weaving, and lace making in the home. Although these skills required a great amount of effort and patience to learn, they were not considered art forms, but were looked down upon as merely crafts. This relates to how women are not taken seriously in professional endeavors and are limited by society to domestic duties. Furthermore, when women made these crafts, they were not doing it just for their own enjoyment, they rather created useful objects for others because it would be selfish for a woman to partake in something for her own pleasure. A woman has to exist to provide for others.
By using crochet to make clothing, I want to take on how clothing is used as a means of expression, as I use clothing as one of my main forms of gender expression. Although clothing is an inanimate object, we assign gender to different articles of clothing and therefore assume the gender of others based on their clothing. We expect men and women to dress only in the garments that are assigned their gender. When I wanted to dress more masculinely as a child, I was met with pushback and ridicule from my family and peers. However, it is generally viewed as more acceptable for women to dress in a masculine manner than it is for men to dress in a feminine manner. If a woman wears a suit it is met with less aversion than if a man wears a dress. This is due to the fact that ultimately society deems femininity to be a negative trait.