SELF-MADE WOMAN Concha Ros
Dona en construcció , 250 x 140 cm, llapis sobre paper © Concha Ros
This exhibition project reflects on two themes: gender roles and personal growth. Both problems are closely linked, since growth as a person (whether person-woman or person-man) is, as we all know, enormously conditioned by the stereotypes derived from gender roles, which are already active in the first place within the family.
Reflecting on it induces me to work with my own body. A woman's body that, in the process of growth/ageing, self-discovers and builds itself... The idea of drawing me drawing myself is then born as a metaphor when I look for a way to express the concept of growth, of building myself. And in this process, as an outstanding feature of a woman of my generation, this repression is evident, being, what is worse, unaware of it. Sadly, it is to denote a castrating dependence on men which means that every woman's decision must be sanctioned, ratified and "blessed" by the competent male authority in the family environment, regardless of her intellectual capacity.
Times haven't changed that much. The traits of the most sassy machismo tone have been almost extinguished, at least on this side of the map. But there is still a gap, a remnant of patriarchy against which we women have to fight on a daily basis, both in the family and at work.
This would be the thesis of the series Self-Made Woman, which in a second moment begins to evolve going further, in a "curl the psychoanalytic curl", when I consider the possibility of leaving myself and observing from the outside how I draw/construct myself, turning the process into an exercise of voyeurism practiced on myself through a peephole. This is how Soi Même's Voyeuse series came about.
Thus, the objectives of the creative process that this project includes are twofold: one of a personal nature, in trying to reach my own essence and banish the stereotypes that do not allow me to grow, and the other general, in contributing to the struggle for the adoption of a more open and egalitarian social model.
