I’m the ‘vaginal knitting’ perfomance artist – and I want to defend my work

A couple of years ago, three separate friends told me that they’d dreamt of me the previous night. My cameo appearances weren’t spectacular (in my friend Meg’s dream, I was cast as a taxation specialist) but the coincidence struck me as poignant. That ephemeral images of me had floated unbidden into three distinct dream worlds made me feel, somehow, that I existed more solidly in this one.

Over the past two weeks, over 3.5m people have watched the YouTube clip shot by SBS2 documenting my 28 day performance piece, Casting Off My Womb, at Darwin’s DVAA. The short clip, which SBS2 titled Vaginal Knitting, gives an overview of the work in which I used skeins of wool lodged in my vaginal tunnel to knit a long passage, marking one full menstrual cycle.

My image and work have been consumed, contemplated and commented on by millions across the globe. It’s interesting then, that all of this electronic crackle and buzz has not altered my identification with it at all. My image and imagery of my work has zipped through minds from Nigeria to Taiwan to Finland yet, in many ways, the personal impact has been less than the dreams of a few friends that I felt marked me more firmly into existence.

The response to the clip was immediate, massive and, for the most part, negative, marked with fear and repulsion. The word “ick” features heavily, as do “eww”, “gross” and “whyyyy?”. Exclamation points are afforded entire comment boxes, broken only by the odd question mark. Everything comes in for criticism; the menstrual blood used in the work probably cops the most, but viewers have taken swipes at my hair-cut, my eyebrows, my skin, my home-city, my choice of words, my knitting technique and the colour of my shirt. The nature of the response wasn’t unexpected, but the scale of it was and it’s been fascinating to watch.

Although the obvious conceptual disjunct between the vagina and knitting is probably what has arrested the web’s attention, it is an entirely different body part that seems to infuriate the most: my face. Commentators seem to be genuinely outraged that I would dare to do something that they view as strange and repulsive with my body without displaying shame. Women putting themselves forward in any capacity in the world is frowned upon, and for a woman to put herself forward in a way that is not designed to be attractive or pleasing is downright seditious. People are incensed!

One of the most common comments in forums is that I am an “attention seeker” – levelled as a clear criticism. But as an artist, I do seek attention for my work – I want to express and communicate ideas, and I refuse to feel compunction for that. What I am not seeking through this work is external validation of myself – in fact, the work is primarily about casting off the need for validation from external sources.

As the deafening response to my work demonstrates, there is a hell of a lot of clamouring noise in society about what a person with a body like mine should and shouldn’t be doing with it. The pitch and volume of opinions can be so overwhelming that it’s difficult to quiet the noise, step back and choose a clear and autonomous path. With Casting Off My Womb I have attempted to do just that by paring concepts about body parts and activities related to women back to their most elemental. Over the course of the month I sat with the steady rhythm of the knitting needles and of my body and created a work that I have complete confidence in, a confidence that thousands of internet opinions have not dinted.

In the gallery setting, viewers responded with more circumspection and respect than they have in subsequent internet forums. I have hopes that after the noise of the visceral reaction dies down on the web, people might take time to consider why they responded the way they did. That they will stop trying to dictate what I do with my body and spend some time contemplating why they feel such a strong need to do so.

But regardless of whether they take that path or not, I am proud of Casting Off My Womb. I have created a performance piece that I believe is beautiful and valid and I know that this belief can withstand all the negativity in the world. I had hoped to create a work that was about forging a path of self-determination in the face of society’s expectations, but until it was tested in such a public forum that was something I could only dream of.