An artist who was hit with criticism earlier this month thanks to her 108-foot sculpture of a vagina has defended her installation due to its feminist message.
According to the Daily Star, the project was the work of a Brazilian artist named Juliana Notari, who spent a grand total of 11 months building the gigantic, bright-red vulva, (nicknamed "Diva") before proudly unveiling it on New Year's Eve.
Juliana shared several pictures of the completed artwork - a 108-foot (33-meter) reinforced concrete vagina - which was installed at a rural art park near the site of a disused sugar mill in Mata Sul Pernambucana in northeast Brazil.
In a lengthy caption, Juliana wrote: "Amid so many rocks in the middle of this dystopian year, I finally finish the year with Diva ready!! [sic]"
She continued: "It was a long process, almost 11 months of a lot of persistence, coexistence, and learning. Diva after all is a big handmade sculpture.
"As Roberto [Gatis] - the engineer responsible for the work - demonstrated, he could not use [an] excavator, because it would not allow him to accurately carve the reliefs [the artwork] needed.
"So it was over 40 hands to make Diva rise, over 20 men working in a heroic effort under the sun, amid a lot of music and joking."
She added:
"In Diva, I use art to dialogue with issues that refer to gender issues from a female perspective combined with a cosmopocentric and anthropocentric western society.
"Currently these issues have become increasingly urgent. After all, it is by changing perspective of our relationship between humans and [between] humans and nonhuman, that will allow us to live longer on that planet and in a less unequal and catastrophic society."
However, Diva proved controversial when Notari uploaded pictures of the artwork to her official Facebook account, with many other social media users decrying the sculpture as lewd and obscene.
For instance, one person wrote: "That's a whole lot of time and effort just to advertise having a mental illness and a fixation with your genitals."
Another person wrote: "What in the hell is that?? Imagine building a sculpture of a massive c*** on a riverbank and saying all that complicated perspective society mojo."
Another Facebook user wrote: "Poor nature, that was destroyed for this awful 'thing' - what a shame."
Now Notari has defended the political and aesthetic merits of her sculpture in a new statement. Speaking to Insider, Notari stated:
"I have to say that Diva cannot be reduced to a vulva. Diva is a big wound. If she were just a vulva, I would have made the big lips, the clitoris.
"I am not interested in building just one vulva, as it is precisely its form of wound that makes it possible to open the field of meanings of the work."
Insider also notes that this isn't the first time her portfolio has depicted the female anatomy, with her prior works displayed in France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands including artwork of a bleeding vagina that used real cow's blood as a special effect.
