Trending and Popular YouTube Video of the Day: Vagina Knitting [WATCH]
Casey Jenkins, a feminist performance artist hailing from Melbourne, Australia, unveils a new form of knitting method: vagina knitting. As absurd as it sounds, she certainly proves that the two words are no longer oxymoron.
Jenkins is a member of "Craft Cartel," who describes themselves on their website as "for crafty types who don't dig rose-scented doilies." The "craftivists" use art and performance as a tool to protest about feminist and social issues.
The 34-year-old artist explained her plans for the unusual piece of performance art called "Casting Off My Womb." "I'm spending 28 days knitting from wool that I've inserted in my vagina," said Jenkins. "Everyday I take a new skein of wool that's been wound so that it will unravel from the center and I stick it up inside me... and then I pull out the thread and knit."
The artist also discussed the concept of vagina knitting. "If you take a good, hard look at a vulva, you realize it's just a bit of a body. There's nothing that is shocking or scary, you know, nothing that is going to run out and eat you up," she said. "The piece for me is about assessing and being intimate with my own body."
Casey Jenkins is performing her piece in a gallery where she sits daily wearing only a woolen jumper as she knits, with her increasingly long masterpiece hung across coat hangers in front of her. She claimed that the experience has not been painful.
"It's unusual and it's confining because I am attached to this knitting so I can't get up and wander around," said Jenkins. "So it is restrictive, but it's not painful. I mean people push babies out of there so it is a pretty robust area."
The performing artist also shared that she plans to continue with the piece even during her period. "The performance wouldn't be a performance if I were going to cut out my menstrual cycle from it," she said. "When I'm menstruating it makes knitting a hell of a lot harder because the wool is heavy and you have to yank at it."
Through her art, Casey Jenkin wants to challenge the negative and fearful view of the female genitalia.
"I think the expectation when you're showing the vulva is that people are going to feel fear and revulsion," she said. "So by linking the vulva to something that people find warm and fuzzy and benign and even boring, such as knitting for a long period of time, I hope that people question their fears and the negative association with it."
Well, now we know that knitting is not only for grandmas.