The female experience is a reoccurring theme in my work. My jewelry and sculpture is informed by everyday interactions and observations of gender-based expectations or generalizations. Within advertisements, popular culture, and the media; similar colors, patterns, shapes, beautification techniques, and pastimes intended for women are apparent. My material choices, surfaces, and forms are developed in one way through my exposure and interest in this experience.
The shapes and forms of my pieces come from disparate inspirations including the female form, faceted gems, historic jewelry and metalwork, and tools or implements for beautification or medical procedures. The surfaces of my work are often ornate, etched with lace patterns, and at times are paired with actual crocheted elements. These choices allude to femininity initially by being flowery, lacelike, and curvilinear, by their association with popular use in women’s apparel, and since the act of crochet or lace making is currently and was historically known as a women’s skill. I choose to incorporate skin, red, and pink toned colors in my work primarily to reference human flesh, cosmetics, the body, and blood.
Materials such as skin toned rubber and mirrors reference bodily transformation, self-examination, and vanity. Other materials like pearls, jewels, lustrous fabrics, feathers, enamel, hair, silver, and gold are chosen for their aesthetic qualities, emotional resonance, preciousness, and value associations. With these materials, formal considerations, and influences I create work that is both playful and beautiful and at times even absurd or humorous.
We (Cayla Skillin-Brauchle and Danielle C. Wyckoff) have come together to birth Reproductive Media, a project that focuses on all things family, gender, sex, and reproduction. Iterations of Reproductive Media have included a Mobile Zine Library and performative actions and workshops in which we facilitate discussions on these themes. The Reproductive Media Zine Library’s collection includes dozens of contributors who have produced zines related to these topics, ranging from personal experiences to statistics and facts. Our curatorial vision for this library is inclusive: we encourage individuals to share diverse information, experiences, and interpretations. This collection is an ongoing and ever-growing library.
Part of Reproductive Media’s larger mission is to provide educational and advocacy materials and support. Current resources we have produced as free booklets include ways to advocate for family-friendly* workplaces, suggestions for creating more inclusive educational settings, and other tools to advocate for legislative change such as ones that would support families for medical leave. (*We recognize an inclusive definition of family and remember that people receive love and support from partners, elders, children, siblings, lovers, pets, friends, and more.)
Reproductive Media stems from our shared investment in discussion and because our individual artistic practices utilize conversation and crowdsourcing as a tactic to research and create projects. Wyckoff’s project, “Please Tell Me a Story About Love,” has traveled around the world asking folks to do just that. The project’s open-ended structure situates the artist as listener, hearing and recording stories about all forms of love. Skillin-Brauchle’s “Data Collection” performances seek to create local data sets by interviewing community members in public places. While disparate in their approaches, these projects act as non-judgemental agents, recorders of contemporary experience. Our projects focus on the ‘local,’ whether that be a site or a community, and both projects collect responses that fuel our individual artwork in other material forms.
We believe that critical discussions require space. Reproductive Media creates such a space, one that is a public yet private forum, to talk about all things family, sex, gender, and reproduction: the choice to parent or not; the experiences of non-binary lives; governmental policy that is restrictive and policy that is protective; the challenges and rewards of parenting; experiences of becoming a parent through adoption, foster care, birth, or other paths; LBGQTIA+ rights; infertility and the emotional, physical and financial implications; miscarriage and fetal loss; birth control; abortion; models of prenatal care and giving birth (medical model and midwifery model); reproductive rights; reproductive privilege based on identity and socio-economics; sex; babies; gender; consent.