Artist Defends 108-Foot Vulva Sculpture Erected For Its Feminist Message
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The artist behind a giant, vulva-esque piece of art in Brazil has defended her work from its detractors.
The 108-foot piece of art was installed on a hillside in Brazil’s Usina de Arte sculpture park, and it quickly caught people’s attention after it was compared to a giant vulva in the press.
Juliana Notari, the artist behind the quirky piece, which she named ‘Diva’, then received backlash for the artwork’s anatomical inaccuracy as it seemed to lack a clitoris and labia. However, it turns out it wasn’t intended to be interpreted simply as a vagina, and has much more meaning behind it.
Discussing the matter with Insider, Notari explained:
I have to say that Diva cannot be reduced to a vulva. Diva is a big wound. If she were just a vulva, I would have made the big lips, the clitoris. I am not interested in building just one vulva, as it is precisely its form of wound that makes it possible to open the field of meanings of the work.
She added, ‘In ‘Diva’ I use art to dialogue with issues that refer to gender issues from a female perspective combined with a cosmopocentric and anthropocentric western society.’
‘Diva’ took Notari more than 11 months to complete, a time she describes as ‘months of a lot of persistence, coexistence and learning’.
While Notari says that the piece ‘cannot be reduced to a vulva’, in a Facebook post shared at the end of December, the artist described it as ‘a Land Art, a massive vulva / wound excavation’.
This isn’t Notari’s first antaomy-related art, having previously made a piece commissioned across Europe of a bleeding vagina using cow’s blood.
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