How to be a Monster
“He looked like a demon”
-Officer Daren Wilson describing Michael Brown, from the official record of his grand jury testimony.
“The monster is that being who refuses to adapt to her circumstances. Her fate. Her body”
-Bhanu Kapil, Incubation: A Space for Monsters
“But as E.H. Gombrich has taught us in another context, the ‘innocent eye’ is an illusion, for what we see is coloured by our cultural expectations. To put it slightly differently, when the West turned its cultural mirror toward the Other, what it saw reflected in it was its own Self.”
-Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art
A catalogue for this work is available to view and download by clicking here.
This project was selected to be featured in the Dangerous Women Project, an online space highlighting women's perspectives housed in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. You can read the text I wrote for the project, which delves into some of the symbolism in this work, by clicking here. In 2021, this contribution was included in the anthology "The Art of Being Dangerous" published by Leuven University Press and distributed in the US via Cornell University Press.
I also wrote an essay inspired by this project, which appeared in print and online, which you can read by clicking here.
