Periods and The First Girl

Introduction

The First Girl Sarah Martin

“A consequence can be recruited as a cause. It might be assumed you caused your own damage because you left the safety of a brightly lit path. Gender norms too can work like this: when femininity is registered as fragility, when that fragility is used to explain what happens to her, or what she can and cannot do, a consequence of power is recruited as the cause”.  Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 164-5

A First Girl as an idea is the antithesis of the Final Girl, the popular trope used in horror films of the last woman alive. The First Girl is a female character that appears early in a film whose brutalized body is used as spectacle to set a plot forward, with her identity as an afterthought. This dichotomy sets the stage for my body of work, featuring textile and photography, that recreates and recontextualizes imagery sourced from the horror genre.

Blood Rug (2021-23) plays on the campiness within fictional horror– the bright red artifice of corn syrup– and evokes a pop-cartoon aesthetic in dialogue with the somber reality of violence seen in the photographic works, playing out in the gallery like a supercut of slasher movies. These rugs are figurative bodies in the space, referencing leftover blood pools from sites of violence, and are unavoidable in order to access a closer look to the photographic works on the wall.

My exhibition focuses on the life and death of the female figure in these horror tropes— their expendability, their disposability, but also their life, vitality, and effervescent attraction to subverting expectation, regardless of punishment. Violence often becomes sensationalized, in real life and fiction, and the result of that sensationalism reduces the victim, the First Girl, to being only her body, the spilling of her blood, and revealing of her flesh. This aestheticized violence affects more than one kind of girl, even though the imagery presented in pop culture, and thus reflected in this exhibition, assumes a purity inextricably linked with whiteness.

Horror films typically present narratives that are intended to convince viewers that the female victim deserved the violence and cruelties committed against them. This casual violence in depiction of women reveals deep-seated patriarchal values within the genre. In my fascination of horror films and making this work, I looked at how the actions, behaviors, and attitudes leading to a victim’s demise, within any given horror film narrative, is illustrative of the social messaging that affirms and normalizes the disposability of women. I think of this disposability as symptomatic of a broader misogyny embedded in Western culture. The fictional First Girls, in their fleeting moments of being alive on screen, push against heteronormative values and the expectations of their gender, acting recklessly under the rules of horror but acting on their own agency until the end. I am inspired by First Girls and strive to be that type of woman.

This body of work was developed during my Master of Fine Arts studies at the University of Waterloo, from 2021-2023. I would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for their support.

Special thanks to Cat Stambolic, Joshua Sabourin, Amy Friend, and Sonya Marie de Lazzer.

Periods.

My artistic journey delves into the historical and contemporary landscape of women's mental well-being, intertwining it with narratives of pain and trauma. Exploring the concept of hysteria through the lens of patriarchy, I illuminate its metaphorical resonance with feminine mental health, rooted in an archaic association with the uterus. Installations like Period. (264g and 0g of sugar, silk, the artist’s menstrual cycle, hysteria) and Dear Euodia draw from my personal narrative to construct spaces addressing the mental well-being of both historical and contemporary women. Periods., manifests as a series of expansive photographic installations documenting my body and mind. By drawing connections between sugar addiction and mental illness, particularly anxiety, my work challenges prevailing medical beliefs suggesting a potential liberation from mental illness through sugar cessation. Periods. expands as an exploration of fragility, value, and voice, utilizing silk, photographs, and glass jars to materialize the delicate interplay of vulnerability and isolation surrounding mental illness. By extending the discourse on the contemporary scrutiny of a woman's mind within the medical realm, Periods. beckons viewers to reconsider the narratives and perceptions that persist in our present day.

Kaitlyn Roberts (she/her)

I am a interdisciplinary artist I am an interdisciplinary artist absorbed in how art-making and art-viewing can create an empathetic relationship to the vulnerability and isolation surrounding mental illness. Through the use of photography, installation, and mixed media, my practice-based study conveys certain aspects of my autobiographic experiences. By inviting viewers into my memoirs, I aim to bring mindfulness and emotion into the gallery space.

I am originally from Bowmanville, ON, and achieved my Honours BA in Visual Arts from Brock University. I have shown my work in juried shows around Canada including, Niagara Artist Centre’s Fortune Favours, the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington’s The VAC 39th Annual Juried Show, Langley Art Gallery’s Memories, and Gallery 44’s Envision. I am currently living and working in Vancouver, BC, where I have received my Master of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design