Sometimes an idea emerges from the simplest observation. While at the Coordenadas Residencia in Buenos Aires, holding a small plastic deer in my hand, I turned it over and saw something unexpected: From above, the head and antlers resembled a woman’s reproductive system. The resemblance was uncanny—the branching antlers mirrored fallopian tubes, the head a uterus. I wasn’t looking for this connection, but once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. And in the context of Doe & Deery, a new project that maps queer aesthetics onto hunting culture, this realization felt like a sharp and urgent addition to the visual language I’ve been developing.
At the core of this exhibition is an exploration of power—who holds it, how it is taken, how it is displayed. Trophy hunting, especially in its most performative form, is about turning a living thing into an object of conquest. But it’s never the whole animal that’s preserved. It’s just the antlers. The head. The parts that signify dominance. The body—what made the creature move, live, breathe—is discarded.
Testing out a soft antler structure.
This is where the connection to gender and violence becomes impossible to ignore. The language of hunting and the language of toxic masculinity are eerily similar. A hunted animal is taken down. A woman is taken. Men in both spaces talk about bagging, mounting, conquering. The trophy is proof. And just like the mounted antlers on a hunter’s wall, women’s bodies are often reduced to their reproductive function—what they can produce, what can be extracted, what can be claimed.
What happens if I take these trophy antlers and render them pink or with floral textiles?
New fabrics purchased during my art residency in Argentina.
Pink and floral motifs have complicated histories. They are associated with softness, femininity, even vulnerability. But here, they function as disruption. Its use forces a viewer to stop seeing antlers as symbols of masculine triumph and instead recognize them as something intimate, internal—something that was never meant to be exposed in this way. By isolating the antlers, removing the neck, removing the body, they become something else entirely. A diagram. A biological map. A reclamation.
This sparks so many questions for me about format and materials. Should they appear within Doe & Deery as artifacts or do they stand alone? Has this been done before? Is this new or just new to me? I think the closest I’ve seen aligned with this thinking is Dana Dangers series Big’Uns from 2017 and there’s been considerable writing about the parallel between hunting culture and the violence of men.
I find myself drawn to the idea of making them subtle, but to know me is to know I don’t do subtle well. It would be great to let the recognition creep in slowly and let the viewer realize on their own that they are not looking at antlers at all, but at a body made absent. A trophy of what or of whom? — How does a trophy like this tell a story and whose story is missing? More to come…