Sarah Feng

Since reading the Odyssey, Circe, and other mythological books, I grew interested in how mythology informs the perceptions we hold today. In Images 1-2, I created my original mythological scenes and analyzed inheritance in folktales, realizing that my interest lay in the mythology of female figures by depicting Helen of Troy and Faulkner’s Caddy in Image 3, who are both voiceless females defined by mens’ desires and memories. What intrigued me was the highly arbitrary assortment of characteristics used to define what was ‘proper’ in society to be a woman, and their origins in religion and literature. What constitutes the gaze of society on women? In Images 4-7, I constructed surreal landscapes of a woman’s inner mind, where she must deny her own identity and desires for autonomy due to feeling watched. Throughout, I read poetry, classics, religious texts, and critical essays about femininity to inform my work, such as the Book of Genesis and the Feminine Mystique. We grow acclimated to this sense of isolation, but I hoped to end with Image 10, where the ‘prey’ is able to reclaim its identity at the moment when we believe we are drowning, recovering our autonomy to fight back.