Nyx is an artist and vulvactivist, determined to advocate for (all) women’s rights through the proliferation of pussy power. Her work explores the language and symbolic potential of the vagina as a source of female empowerment, lived experience and a vital site for activism.
“We must have agency over our own bodies, the right to choose, self-determination, medical autonomy and access to information. We must celebrate ourselves, claim space and take back the language of our bodies in celebration of our embodied dynamism and in protest of the continued violence against women’s (including queer and trans) bodies – be it physical, political, social or through the limiting of rights, education, representation and bodily control.”
Nyx uses humour, language and abstraction to cross the borders of her internal and external experience and explore the disparity between how women are perceived and how they feel about their bodies.
My secret garden includes two bodies of work. 40 Vaginas, a series of 40 embossed prints of slang terms for the vagina, reclaims and celebrates an embodied language of women’s experience. “To name a thing is to know it, and we must remove all stigma, embarrassment, uncertainty, fear and misunderstanding around our own bodies and parts.” The use of embossed white paper symbolically alludes to purity, innocence and goodness, juxtaposed with language that is considered vulgar and even profane, positioning the work at a point of tension between the virgin and whore dichotomised perception of women. Nyx is playful in her construction of the words, focused on form as well as subject; they are funny, cute, confident and unapologetic. It’s a joke and an exaltation.
The Voids and Chasm series illustrates the female anatomy as a series of abstract images compiled of geometric shapes. The use of geometry attempts to present an at once expansive and direct, simplified depiction of the female body. It acknowledges that anatomy is not universal to a shared female experience.
“I experience my body as sensations (often conflicting), pain, pleasure, hot, wet, dry, knowable, mysterious, monstrous, divine, powerful, broken. When I visualise my body, I see shapes and colours.” – Nyx
