Corpus Couture - Hounen Pudendum

'Corpus Couture - Hounen Pudendum’ playfully fashions genitalia as wearable adornment. The intimate ‘pubic’ becomes ’public’ spectacle to scrutinise proposed physical and metaphoric boundaries of the body in relation to dress, visual culture and physical space.

My idea of the body is the imagined, the metaphoric, the other, the disciplined, the transgressive, the expected body manifesting and mutating as worn physical accessory. My awareness also extends to how the individual wearer transforms the bodily adornments and plays a part in a much larger body, ‘the Communal Body’.



This body of work addresses the precarious nature of defining a concrete boundary for the body. I am highlighting how the viewing of artificial appendages, such as clothing as purely supplementary is problematic. The supplement, though not obligatory, is essential in addressing the body as a complete composite.



‘Corpus Couture’ is a body of work made up of individually crafted adornment pieces. Adornment is tactile, wearable as well as visually intoxicating, not only serving to create a contemplative relationship between the art object and its’ possessor, but also a physical one. ‘Corpus Couture’ adornments precariously juxtapose ‘heavily loaded’ motifs to intellectually penetrate their possessors.



The danger and allure of the ‘Corpus Couture’ adornments lie mostly in the marital system of their consumption:


Step 1 Window-shopping in the object of desires house (pursuit/hunt)
Step 2 Discovering the object of desire (meeting eyes across the room)
Step 3 Flirtatious contemplation of the object of desire (courting/calculating)
Step 4 Exchanging goods as to possess the object of desire (dowry payment)
Step 5 Possession of the object of desire (ownership/control)



The owner of an art adornment piece is arguably more involved with and accountable for their possessed artwork, than say an owner of a painting. When worn, the owner physically occupies space with the artwork; it becomes a part of their physical identity, part of their complete body presentation.



The adornment pieces are made and presented in limited editions. This allows an intimate reading whilst still alluding to ideas about consumption/desire and mass-production.




‘Hounen Pudendum - Part iii’

Folded, formed, scrunched, glued, stitched and illuminated new and found materials form the male and female cod-pieces that make up ‘Hounen Pudendum‘. Consciously, I aim to reduce my dependence on heading straight for prescribed art store-bought materials in my work, due to personal reservations about environmental impact/convenience/mass-production/art hegemony etc. Found objects are attractive, both for their narrative history as well as their temporal/weathered Zen-like quality. ‘Hounen Pudendum’ cod-pieces are difficult to place, appearing as both refined art-object and as crass novelty-item. Brutally manipulated recycled tea-bag papers make up delicate forms echoing the light-weight and transparent nature of Japanese rice paper as well as the enamel staining of Zen ceramics.



The paradoxical nature of teabag paper, is also inline with Zen, despite its humble, domestic appearance and application, teabag paper is constructed from abaca hemp, known to be the toughest of papermaking fibres. The domestic nature of using teabag paper to construct the male/female genital sheathes is also heightened by macramé knotting over wire armatures using new and found DMC cotton, synonymous with ‘lesser‘ female dominated textile arts. These genitals as formal outer-garments are further displaced when illuminated using club culture glow-sticks, appearing at once numinous and fetishistic. The body parts as clothing acts as both a separate supplement when viewed individually and part of a whole body composite when attached using a dress tie belt, a dress tie being neutral as both a contemporary male/female accessory.

Illuminated cod-pieces were made specifically for the loosely choreographed 'peek-a-boo' performance as part of 'Spincycle 3'(High Vibes Festival, Northcote), an eclectic fashion parade co-ordinated by the innovative melbourne artist/designer, Jo Porter. Performers included Kim Moukas, Mariam Jenehy, Grace Wong along with the artist initiator, Ellen Benson. In retrospect, the choreography could have been slicker and the lighting folk need a heads up to dim the lights!







"A part of this strangeness of dress is that it links the biological body to the social being, and public to the private."

- Elizabeth Wilson


"Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul"

-Quentin Bell (1910-1996)



"The art of procreation and the members employed therein are so repulsive that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species."

- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)





Artist: Ellen Benson
email: ellen_b80@yahoo.com.au

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