Sanné Mestrom

Sanné Mestrom Emily Cormack

A thousand different women

Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer coined this term in, ‘Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into what Women Saved and Assembled—FEMMAGE,’ Heresies I , no. 4 (Winter 1977-78), pp. 66-69. Mestrom’s series Body as verb visualises a woman’s verb—ever moving, shaping, changing, holding, grabbing, kneeling, sinking, striding, being—what her daily doing might look like. Across popular culture and art history women are more frequently represented as adjectives—used to describe a product, a man, or a ‘lifestyle’. Women’s bodies are instrumentalised in this languorous de-verbing. Stripped of action, they are portrayed as coy, limp and inert, and with well-moulded handles for ease of holding. For using and being used, but not for their own doing.

Conversely, in Māori creation stories, the earth mother Papatūānuku is the origin of everything— her deity children, the forest, animals, fish and all life—and yet her ‘form’ is unknown. Papatūānuku’s many offspring are given defined forms, described as human or sometimes animal, whereas Papatūānuku is formless. She is only ever described by her actions, her efforts and her output. Her verbs. She is immanent with all life but in herself has no finite or certain form. Instead, she is an ever-active essence or force, an infinite font of unknowable power.

How then to reconcile this contradiction? The informé of a woman’s doing, whilst we wade the swamp of her décolletage?

Mestrom’s practice digs for this force, the doing. She wields heavy tools to scratch and hack her way to the hot, dark, strength that is the female body. Each of her works hits a hard chord giving rise to the shadow form of woman, twisting her head, not pretty or coy; she has a furrowed brow and thick thighs. As in life—phone to ear, one baby wet-mouthed on the shoulder, another clinging to the bruised thigh, dragging bags, kicking car doors closed, jangling keys in a tangle of hair and sweat, with strong jaw and hard-won composure. In these sculptures Mestrom expresses the exertion, the heavy toil and brute, unspoken effort of woman. Her vagina is thrown forward, her breasts are structural. For in reality, the female body has never been the soft-curved, compliant form imposed upon it. It has always been useful, always busy doing. And yet, her visibility has been so distorted. Shape-shifted, excised, collaged and extracted. Winched-in stomachs, accentuated arses, plumping lips, and labiaplastic distortions. As if we are attempting to internalise a collaged version of ‘woman’, when ‘cut n’ paste’ meets ‘sense of self.’

Femmage1—feminist collage—a term from the 1970s turned this fragmentation into a site of freedom. In co-opting the overlaid cipher of visual pleasure, femmage purported to break it apart, disempowering it. Such collage might show the slick face of fashion models deformed by sliced lips, open to ants or vacuum cleaners. The world of collage is open and endless, either subverting the everyday with slight shifts, or giving way to complete absurdity. Whilst this is a kind of freedom, it relies on the existence of the visual pleasure cipher, the existence of representation.

For Mestrom she begins the collage process anew. Mestrom invents her own sculptural vocabulary through which to view the female form, and female-being. Mestrom’s hard bodies, tables, tools and props are the brutal components of a new visualisation of woman, one that has always been and is no longer reliant on the aestheticised renderings of others. Hers’ are a collage of doing, with the body’s activity a means to agency. Mestrom’s sculptures are a stripped-back rendering of Papatūānuku’s doing, expressions of women’s effortless wielding of the weight of the world.