SENA

Vulva, 2013, Mixed media on felt, pregnancy test, and signed ceramic seal, 156 × 136 cm

“Life begins in the womb. And it is the woman who carries this miraculous organ. This is where we all come from. Everyone arrives on earth through the same gateway. The vulva is the name of that gateway. Vulva is a work I made for all mothers, women, and children who have suffered violence and injustice, and for those women who have sacrificed their own lives in order to protect their children.

Life is built upon cycles. I transformed from a little girl into a young woman, from there into a ‘Woman’, and then into a ‘Mother’.

Although motherhood may appear to be a natural concept within everyday life, for a woman it marks the beginning of an entirely new cycle of existence: a process in which she changes from head to toe, leaves her former self behind, sheds her skin, buds and blossoms again, multiplies, and finally meets the child created from nothing within her womb and brought into the world.

At least, this was how I experienced the process.

After becoming a mother, I began to perceive the world differently. Six billion people walking across the planet—all of them beings who emerged from the body of a woman. It is both astonishing and terrifying. And yet the problems we have still been unable to resolve remain: violence against women, injustice, inequality, and incomplete lives.

When one pauses to think, what could be more important to humanity than a healthy woman? A woman who is healthy—both physically and mentally—means healthy children and a balanced life for the world. In fact, it is very simple. Yet life is equally complex, and I do not know for how many more millions of years humanity, whose substance has been kneaded with fear, will continue to evolve through these cycles.The woman who carries a womb also possesses the creative power of God in a direct and tangible form. She is the source of humanity. I believe one of the lines in Rumi’s Masnavi expresses this most clearly:

“Woman is as though she were the Creator, not the created.”

For me, the Vulva is a symbol situated at the very beginning of all these cycles. It is a gateway opening onto life: the passage through which the first breath is taken and through which everyone enters the world. This is where we all come from. For me, the work contains an intensely personal story while also enabling me to establish a relationship with everyone from an equal distance.

In form, it resembles an animal hide stretched across a wall. Here, of course, there is also a political symbolism. I wanted issues such as the use of the female body, reproduction or non-reproduction under state control, the violence inflicted upon women, the rules imposed upon them, and the transformation of the female body into a sexual object through the complete loss of its sacredness to become visible.

By enlarging the vulva beyond its actual scale—even monumentalising it—I wanted to emphasise its sublimity. The piece, produced from natural felt, takes the form of an organic flower-like object. Owing to the nature of wool, it is soft and warm; it creates in the viewer a desire to touch, drawing them in while simultaneously provoking them.