The Harpy
Drawing from mythology, feminist material culture, and domestic craft, The Harpy explores the duality of femininity through narrative objects. The Harpy, part-woman, part-bird, has long been cast as monstrous, seductive, and feared. Always a sidelined figure, drastically bent and reshaped over time. It is this distortion that attracts me. And in exploring these women, I’ve started to understand the ways I’ve been flattened too.
Working across illustration and embroidery, the first lamp presents a fixed narrative, a visual interpretation of the Harpy’s layered mythology rendered through illustrated surfaces and tactile materials. It forms part of my exploration into the Harpy’s visual evolution. The second lamp expands this inquiry through modularity. Interchangeable sliding frames allow users to alter the composition, shift meaning, and create their own sequence, introducing play, interpretation, and transformation into the act of viewing.
These works consider how everyday objects can hold stories, mutable, participatory, and feminist in intent. Through the Harpy, I’ve been able to explore what it means to take fragmented, often distorted histories and translate them into material form, something I can hold and question, exploring the ways stories shift when we hold them in our hands.