New York-based artist Caroline Wayne uses beadwork and obsessive hand-sewing to create these intricately embellished sculptures and masks. This intensive method reflects the emotional labour involved in the very personal topics she explores; sexual independence, childhood incest and sexual assault.

Caroline Wayne’s works are as beautiful as they are unsettling. The masks trigger disgust with their lack of facial features and gaping holes for mouths, but at the same time, they entice the viewer with the aesthetic appeal of their heavily embellished designs.

Wayne’s sculptures are also charming in their aesthetics; rounded forms decorated with glistening beads and colourful sequins. Yet they too illustrate unsettling truths from the artist’s childhood.

Using millinery techniques learned at art college, Caroline Wayne begins her sculptures by carving blocks out of polystyrene. She then seals, felts and sets them. Wayne decides on a colour palette in advance so that she can work uninterrupted, beading slowly and intuitively, one bead at a time. Without the use of stencils or image transfers, Wayne chalks out a composition and follows rough sketches. She makes adjustments as she stitches, which is a process she describes as being similar to painting.

The beading of these pieces serves two functions. Firstly, it is used to beautify difficult and ugly narratives, making the reality of sexual abuse into something more bearable. Secondly, the intense labour of beading is a reflection of the emotional labour involved in confronting these subjects.

‘I think craft, in general, is an honest way to not just be in touch with yourself but to communicate genuineness with others. There’s an innate humanness in needlework that can’t be separated from the finished product like it can in some other forms of artwork. I go into a trance-like state from brain to fingers that’s almost meditative where only the purest thoughts can survive. The physicality of sewing is my way of staying in touch with reality.’

Caroline Wayne’s recent exhibition ‘Pretty Real’ at A.I.R Gallery displayed a collection of embellished sculptures illustrating narratives from dreams. The scenes depicted symbolise her childhood traumas as a victim of sexual abuse. Wayne states that child abuse is too often ignored for the reason that such horrific events are too hard for people to imagine, and therefore to confront. She explains her intention for the exhibition and goes into depth about some of the works below.

‘The objective of Pretty Real was to illustrate a dark and painful reality in a way that was more digestible for the viewer by using embellishment and scenes from symbolic dreams rather than the traumatic event itself.

I chose six dreams that are varied enough to cover a spectrum of suggestions, some that played out like narratives on a storyboard and others that are easily defined by one dramatic scene. The stories are as such:

[one_half padding=”0 10px 0 75px”]’Deep End’ is the first nightmare I remember having when I was just four years old (trauma experienced even earlier and during). The dream was of a whale chasing a mermaid in a swimming pool, so there was no escape, it was terrifying at the time. The pink on the side of the pool is the blanket I used to sleep with when I was a kid.[/one_half][one_half_last padding=”0 75px 0 10px”][/one_half_last]

[one_half padding=”0 10px 0 75px”]‘Splash’ is a reference to one of the dreams that later led to a direct memory when I was fully conscious. In the dream version, I saw a shadow of a man leaning over me, stabbing at me with a pen. Tension mounted and it ended with the pen exploding with a spray of moths filling the room and clouding my vision. We were in a room with plaid everywhere, plaid walls, furniture, bed sheets and curtains, which explains the pattern on the back.[/one_half][one_half_last padding=”0 75px 0 10px”][/one_half_last]

[one_half padding=”0 10px 0 75px”]‘Stuffed’ was actually the scariest dream in the series. After I had it I was kind of out of commission for a couple weeks. In the dream I felt myself flying backwards in pitch blackness, all I could see were my legs and little jean skirt I was wearing. I felt a fullness in my vagina, reached down to check and from that started to pull out parts of a fast food meal. An old tomato, cheeseburger, a crushed soda cup. While I kept flying there was an object next to me that looked sort of like a kitchen tool, like a wooden clamp with spikes on it, my dream brain decided it was an object for my protection. As we went along the spikes started to blow off and it gradually fell apart and disappeared. I kept flying in darkness and terror. While this dream may sound too weird to be horrifying I think because it was one of the first that so symbolically linked me to the emotional feeling of being both violated and helpless at the same time it took me a while to recover from it.’[/one_half][one_half_last padding=”0 75px 0 10px”][/one_half_last]

Caroline Wayne’s earlier body of work explores the power of female self-objectification. Her embellished masks speak of the journey to reclaiming one’s own body from a society that objectifies and exploits it without permission.

‘Was it something I said?’, ‘Cream’ and ‘Untitled Pink’ are all heavily embellished faceless masks with gaping mouths. Each mask is functional with zippers up the back so that it can be worn. With double entendre titles and glaring sexual innuendos, the masks act as tools in subverting the patriarchal system of oppression.

In 2012 Caroline Wayne created an interactive piece built around these masks. During the exhibition, visitors became participants by engaging in sexually explicit text conversations with the artist.

‘I created a two-part project called Was It Something I Said? The piece showed a fully beaded mask on a stand built to human height along with a stitched prompt at the base instructing to “text me” followed by a phone number. When a participant texted the number, they would receive a photo of myself wearing the mask and a red lace bra with a text attempting to initiate a sexual conversation. The exchange would last as long as they responded, stayed on topic, and until the end of the exhibit.

The objective of this piece was not just to demonstrate a woman’s agency over her own sexuality, but to test what others do when confronted with it. I kept my interactions with each viewer privately anonymous. With permission to text intimately with a total stranger, I found that most participants held nothing back.

I received plenty of dirty word-play, invitations to meet up, even nude photos, and not a hint of threat or criticism, at least nothing direct.

For a while, I considered this a successful project, a library of intimate spaces I had created for individuals to sexually express themselves freely without fear of judgment, shame, or censorship. It wasn’t until a few days into the second time exhibiting the work that the outside shaming I had been so familiar with was used to censor me, and the sexting portion of the experiment discontinued due to a complaint.

Thus, the experiment ended not necessarily in failure but with a conclusion that sadly proved the justification for creating the piece to begin with. A woman taking control of her own sexuality is still seen as an offensive act. Tabloids, gossip websites, social media accounts, are all perfectly free to scrutinize, slander, or objectify a woman’s body, however, they see fit, but once she has the power to claim it for herself there is an icy silence soon followed by even harsher criticism. Even worse when publicly owning our own sexuality we are faced with the unwanted advances and hostile push-back from men who see our comfort in our own bodies as a direct invitation or as an implied challenge. What is it about the fear of a sexually empowered woman in a patriarchal society? Is it that if she has enough autonomy to ask for sex she is also perfectly capable of rejecting it’?

Wayne is currently working on a new series of larger works, using the same techniques and processes as seen here. These sculptures describe the habits and patterns that the artist has developed as an adult, which can be attributed to the experiences of her childhood trauma.

Wayne continues to be honest and open with her self-exposure to enable people to connect with the work. By unravelling her story through her art, she creates a much-needed space for victims and non-victims alike, to engage in a conversation about sexual abuse and recovery.

Head to Wayne’s website to see more of her work, including more about her social experiments. Follow Wayne on Instagram here.