Entitled Legs began with an interest in masculinity as something unstable — not fixed or singular, but performed, negotiated, and constantly shifting. I wanted the work to feel caught somewhere between strength and vulnerability, theatricality and restraint. Although the bodies appear muscular and physically imposing, the work resists the idea of a stable heroic form. The high heels, the soft materials, and the shared structure all interrupt that reading, allowing the figures to drift into a more ambiguous state. Can masculinity remain coherent once softness, vulnerability, and performance begin to enter the body?
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The work depicts three male-coded figures partially concealed beneath a draped white membrane. I thought about the structure as a temporary skin: something that simultaneously protects, binds, and restrains the figures beneath it. It carries associations with religious processions, ceremonial veils, tents, fashion drapery, and theatrical staging. What interested me was how a single structure could transform separate bodies into a collective form, making it difficult to distinguish where one body begins and another ends. At what point does a body stop feeling singular and begin to merge into something shared?Throughout the work, softness became important. Using fabric and polyester wadding allowed me to move away from the solidity traditionally associated with sculpture. I wanted the surfaces to feel swollen, padded, tactile — somewhere between flesh, costume, and a second skin. The softness destabilises the muscularity of the figures. Rather than presenting masculinity as rigid or self-contained, the porousness of the fabric echoes that of skin itself, allowing the boundaries between the bodies to become less certain beneath the shared membrane. They appear simultaneously powerful and vulnerable, individual and collective. The sculpture occupies a space between presence and performance, seduction and discomfort.The title, Entitled Legs, carries a certain tension for me. The word “entitled” suggests authority, ownership, or privilege, yet the figures themselves feel awkward and constrained, almost trapped within their own performance. The legs become exaggerated theatrical objects rather than symbols of stability or control. I was interested in this contradiction: bodies attempting to maintain power while simultaneously slipping into vulnerability and absurdity. Are the figures holding the structure aloft, or is the structure holding them together?
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“The grotesque body is a body in the act of becoming.”
Mikhail Bakhtin
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Humour and excess become a way of thinking through the body. There is something both absurd and slightly uncomfortable about the elevated heels, clustered limbs gathered beneath a skin-like membrane. Through exaggeration and distortion, the work opens a space where vulnerability and power, desire and discomfort, can coexist. The work moves between these emotional registers rather than settling into a single interpretation.My practice often returns to bodies that exist in transitional states — bodies that are fragmented, softened, hybridised, or difficult to categorise. I’m interested in the threshold where the body stops functioning as a fixed biological certainty and instead becomes something constructed through material, gesture, clothing, technology, and social expectation. In Entitled Legs, the figures hover within that unstable space. They feel simultaneously intimate and artificial, collective and isolated, seductive and vulnerable.Ultimately, Entitled Legs is less about representing masculinity directly and more about creating a situation where identity itself becomes unstable. The sculpture proposes the body as something continuously shaped by pressure, performance, desire, and relation — never complete, never entirely fixed, but continually negotiating the boundaries between self and other.
