Bathroom Tales: Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice

Expressions of
Feminity: Domestic
Space, Voice, Carnival
and the Body

Helen Frankenthaler's Resistant Stain

Constant Carnival
Culture

Bathroom Tales: Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice

© 2007 by Nikki Renee Anderson

In my artwork, I explore the nuances of the feminine experience from reflections of childhood and adolescence. My work addresses private spaces such as bedrooms, dressing rooms and bathrooms because the objects within those spaces become metaphors for identity. The objects have a whimsical quality that suggests imagery related to fairytales and fantasies. In referencing childhood with the aesthetic of the sculptures, I am mapping the beginnings of identity. This paper will explore the ideas of my recent body of work, Bathroom Tales: Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice and the personal history and research that informed the sculptures.

The intertwining of sculpture and voices is important in my expression of femininity; therefore some of the work incorporates sound. The ceramic sculptures resemble body parts, dress forms, toys and other objects designed to act as megaphones. I began placing my voice inside of these sculptures because I am a soft-spoken person and I am constantly told to speak louder. My voice becomes representative of the voices that we all hear inside of ourselves, which can be strengthening, self-doubting and eerie. The sounds are soft and they become the uncensored inner voice speaking to each viewer. To decipher any individual sound clearly, viewers must lean their ears towards each piece. This interaction takes viewers beyond the visual and into the realm of talking and listening, an even more private world of whispered secrets. The voices tell a story about the object that gives another level of understanding about the work. Often the negotiation of listening becomes a humorous or uncomfortable form of intimacy. The physical and spatial relationship between the viewer and the work is important in defining the power of the voices. In Bathroom Tales: Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice, I am connecting the Mother Goose nursery rhyme, "What Are Little Girls", with the objects from the bathroom and the female body. Forms such as a bathtub, toilet and sink morph into desserts and other sweets.

I negotiate between personal experiences, formal and material issues, and ideas that I have developed from theoretical texts. My work often comes from personal history, but it also draws from an intuitive processing of readings and theories. Such sources are not my first concern in making the work but it helps to inform much of what I do as an artist. In Bathroom Tales, I am interested in the cultural training that creates gender roles, the psychological implications of the bathroom space and the female body and image.

The bathroom is a space in which gender roles occur in the way that we learn to habitually use the space. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler considers how we learn gender roles through repetitive actions of social norms.1 Susan Bordo also explores this concept in her article, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” She argues that the body becomes representative of our cultural beliefs and that cultural control is created through mundane habits such as hygiene and cleanliness.2 I have found theories of Carnival from the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin to be influential in rethinking stereotypes about the feminine body. Bakhtin addresses the exaggerated body forms in Carnival that create a grotesque image and present a new idea of the body, which can be completely reinvented.3 I have placed the ideas presented by these writers in my own work and critique of stereotypes. Their ideas map identity from an adult perspective and reference the learning process of gender stereotypes. In my work, I am specifically looking at childhood and adolescence as a starting point for these experiences.

All of the elements of the bathroom have a voice in emphasizing and training gender roles. I both participate in these roles and reject them, and this series of work explores that conflict. These sculptures are intended to be objects of fantasy and to provoke an examination of cultural stereotypes. The bathroom is a space to focus on beauty and hygiene. It is a space where I learned both to emphasize my femininity and also hide myself by putting on makeup, styling my hair and participating in proper rituals of cleanliness. The nursery rhyme explains that little girls are made of "sugar and spice and everything nice." This rhyme is the inspiration for the elements of desserts and sweets in the bathroom objects.

One question that arises in my life and work is the idea of gender being performative. Butler writes, “…sex is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time.”4 I do personally love aspects of being feminine by societal standards. Bathroom Tales is a whimsical inquiry into the shapes, colors and forms of the female body, the bathroom, and desserts. I wear traditional makeup now, and I always played dress-up as a child. During those play sessions, I practiced what I thought it meant to be a woman. Part of this series is a group of small sculptures, which from the exterior, look like white boxes hanging on the wall. As a viewer gets closer to look inside the boxes, there are sculptures that reference cosmetics, jewelry, ice cream and the female body coated with resin. They reflect my memories of playing dress-up in my parent’s bathroom. When I was a girl, I looked inside of the world of adult women and found that make-up and jewels were irresistible and fun. As a feminist, I can embrace that experience and image to be empowering, just as another part of me understands that I was learning to perform femininity by playing dress-up in the bathroom. I can also see this practice as threatening to undermine other aspects of self, which are more important. Bordo explores this issue, “Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup and dress—central organizing principles of time and space in the day of many women—we are rendered less socially oriented and more centripetally focused on self-modification.”5 My work addresses this conflict related to stereotypes about women, and I both participate in those roles as well as subvert them.

The Mother Goose nursery rhyme, “What Are Little Girls,” was a fertile point of inspiration for my sculptures because it comes from childhood and it is embedded in our cultural consciousness. While I was thinking about my personal history in creating these sculptures, the universal understanding of that nursery rhyme created an opening for viewers to reflect upon their own ideas. While we can all look critically at the meaning of nursery rhymes as adults, we don’t necessarily understand them that way as children. In this one, little girls are made of, “sugar, spice and everything nice.” The imagery of desserts such as ice cream, syrup and candy presented itself as interesting shapes and materials for sculptural form. Like wearing makeup and playing dress-up, I also love sweets. I really enjoyed creating this aspect of the work because of the enticing and desirable quality of the desserts. The sweets and the color of the sculptures function as a hook to draw viewers into the work. Then as a viewer looks closer, she or he may begin to see the deeper meaning in the spatial and physical context of the work.

The space of the bathroom is a place where I began to reflect upon my body. I have a strong memory from when I was four years old. I was spending the night at a friend’s house and her mom was giving us a bath. As we were sitting in the tub, I compared the shape of our bellies. Mine was soft, round and had folds of skin. I remember asking her why mine looked chubby while hers was thin and flat. Even at that very young age, I wanted my body to be different than it was. I often use the body as a way to express peculiarities, which is related to the material bodily principle in the work of Bakhtin, and his ideas about Carnival culture.6 The objects from this series are a bizarre combination of forms. For example the piece, Twisty Toilet, includes a toilet, ice cream, female breasts, nipples, feet and toes. The sound of the form is a voice saying, “Oh, I’m just a sweet little ice cream cone. Do my feet look chubby to you? I’m a chubby girl.” and a toilet flushing over and over in the background. The idea of combining an ice cream cone, toilet and female breasts lends them a grotesque quality, and the exaggeration of the form is intended to be humorous. Bakhtin describes the humor of the grotesque as being both related to pleasure and displeasure. Pleasure in the work comes from the process of satirizing the stereotypes about women, beauty and the body. Displeasure comes from the reality and long history of those stereotypes. Bakhtin does not address Carnival from a gendered perspective. In fact, some have even called him a misogynist. But I believe that he is still worthwhile for feminists to use because of his theoretical approach to diffusing hierarchies and creating changes within an oppressive system.

Bakhtin’s material bodily principle can be applied further to the sculptures in Bathroom Tales. Bakhtin says, “Thus the artistic logic ignores the closed, smooth and impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescences (sprouts, buds) and orifices, only that which leads beyond the body’s limited space or into the body’s depths.”7 Many of my sculptures incorporate the shape of a breast or a nipple, which doubles as ice cream or candy and can be equated to the bud. The shape functions to be beautiful, desirable and immediately recognizable as feminine. Sugar Nubbins has many of these breast shapes combined together so that the image looks something like a bowl of ice cream scoops. It also has strange hands and feet with abstract fingers and toes, which make it look like a small bizarre doll. Also, this piece has a pedestal made of ceramic that is bulging, layered and rounded and it has pink resin spilled over the surface of it. The shape of the pedestal is based on the shape of marshmallow desserts with pink syrup drizzled over it. It also references folds of a fleshy body and the syrup is like fluids from the body or the bathroom. Hanging Cherries is a figurative form hanging over a towel bar, making the positioning of the figure passive. Also though, the viewer looks right at the ‘butt’ of the figure, which is covered in small round nubbins. Those shapes are referencing sprinkles or candy that you might find on an ice cream sundae, as well as pimples. It is almost as if the figure is intentionally ‘mooning’ the viewer in this playful pose. Sweet Tub is a sculpture that is both a giant ice cream sundae and also a bathtub. It is designed like a claw foot tub but its feet are that of a little girl. The work all has a whimsical quality that reflects back to other memories I have from childhood. In addition to scrutinizing my belly in the bathtub, I also remember playing in the tub for hours on end. I had many moments of giggling and splashing with my sisters in the tub as a little girl. Again there is an emotional conflict in the work and it comes from both the pain of perusing my stomach and the pleasure of playing in the tub.

The images and combinations of forms in these sculptures, from a larger perspective, are exploring the stereotypes about the female body, an image explained in the Mother Goose nursery rhyme. The objects of the bathroom are imagined in a fantastic way but it is the site for many of our daily habits of cleansing, urinating, defecating, dressing and grooming. These rituals begin in childhood; develop over time and influence how we present ourselves to the rest of the world. Bordo writes, “The body—what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend the body—is a medium of culture.”8 These daily rituals come initially out of necessity of cleansing but the way that we conduct them is a trait learned from parents or guardians and ultimately the greater accepted norms in culture. Those accepted norms often times force people into certain molds and can perpetuate stereotypes.

I am interested in the psychological implications and meaning of the architectural space of the bathroom. It is a space where transformation of the body occurs and it is the rehearsal space in which we all prepare before we enter into the world. It can be a place where we find our true selves or where we create a self that we want the world to see. That can be a powerful act when done consciously and a repressive act if one is unaware of the behavior. The sculpture, Swirly Sink with Mirror, was conceived based on my memories of primping in front of the bathroom sink and mirror. In adolescence I began to wake up every morning early to make sure that my hair looked perfect before I left for school. In the beginning, this process was extremely frustrating because I could never get my hair to do what I wished it would do. The mirror in Swirly Sink is designed to look like a mirror from a gingerbread house and the place that would be reflective is just a blank surface. The inability to see one’s reflection in the mirror represents a freedom from that process of grooming and trying to look perfect. The bathroom is part of the greater domestic space, and I have explored domestic space continually in my work. In Beatriz Columina's article, "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," she describes the architecture of Adolf Loos and particularly reflects upon the Zimmer der Dame, or lady’s room. In this case the lady’s room is actually a private, raised sitting area positioned above to overlook the other rooms of the house. She says of this room, “…on the threshold of the private, the secret, the upper rooms where sexuality is hidden away. At the intersection of the visible and invisible, women are placed as the guardians of the unspeakable.”9

The white box-sculptures became like small architectural spaces in which to house the sculptural forms I created. I initially imagined them as jewelry boxes but as I created them, they also evolved into mini rooms, like tiny living spaces. For example, the piece, titled Marshmallow Makeup, includes various layers of wood inside of the box for the sculptures to stand on. The yellow syrupy liquid is a resin and as I worked with it, I realized that I wanted it to puddle in some places and be thinner in others. Cream Pop Box also incorporates layering of the wood inside of the box to mimic the layers in the ceramic sculpture that is displayed and to allow the resin to pool in some areas. With all of these sculptures, the viewer must make the physical effort to look inside of the box because the view from the exterior is meaningless. The viewer must come close the piece and look directly inside. This action creates an intimacy between the viewer and the work that functions like the sound does in the other sculptures. It brings a person into the private, miniature, and fantasy world of the piece. These pieces are sensual and almost delicious looking, and they are a celebration of the stereotypes about women. They become powerful because of the way they draw a viewer into a new vision of femininity based on my sculptural critique of the childhood rhyme of ‘sugar, spice and everything nice.’

Ultimately, with my work, my goal is to open up the definitions and terms by which we define ourselves and create a fantasy about what is possible. By using familiar private spaces such as the bathroom and nursery rhyme, I hope to create sculptures that have a universal meaning. While I start with my own memories as a point of inspiration, I am striving to create many openings for viewers. In this work I have combined many images and forms which are based on stereotypes of femininity, but I have used those to create something that is unique. In her book, Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas explores the idea of people traveling into unknown territory, outside of the norm and then gaining new understanding as a result of that experience. That process in some ways could be considered threatening but it also allows for new patterns or a new sense of order to be discovered.10 I hope to use old ideas about femininity and memories from childhood in my work but create new possibilities for understanding them.

End Notes

1 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

2 Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Kate Conboy, Nadia Mendina and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

3 On the grotesque body, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (The Indiana University Press, 1984), 303

4 Butler, 1.

5 Bordo, 91.

6 On the material bodily principle, see Bakhtin, 368.

7 Bakhtin, 317-318.

8 Bordo, 90.

9 Beatriz Columina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Columina (New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 82.

10 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. (London: Routledge, 1966).

Selected Bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, The Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bordo, Susan, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Kate Conboy, Nadia Mendina and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 91.

Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, New York:Routledge, 1993.

Columina, Beatriz, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Columina, New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.

Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.
London: Routledge, 1966.