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Material Witness: The Feminist Politics of Sculptural Memory

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Material Witness: The Feminist Politics of Sculptural Memory

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This room of the Fragments of Trauma exhibition explores sculpture as a confrontational archive of sexual trauma; one in which the unspeakable is made materially visible and affectively encountered. Sculpture, unlike other expressive forms, does not merely depict this trauma, but enacts it. Through its spatial presence and materiality, sculpture performs sexual trauma both affectively and corporeally. As an artistic medium, it exceeds the boundaries of formal aesthetics. Instead, it operates as a feminist praxis of testimony that resists narrative closure, aesthetic sanitisation, and the demand for coherence. Through physical form, sculpture communicates what language often cannot: the endurance, fragmentation, and unresolved continuity of traumatic experience.

Drawing on Laura Brown’s (1995) feminist critique of Western PTSD frameworks, this room foregrounds how the institutional codification of trauma has systematically marginalised experiences of sexual violence that emerge within the domestic and the everyday. Brown argues that dominant trauma paradigms recognise only extraordinary rupture - war, catastrophe, crisis - rendering private, accumulative, and gendered harm illegible. Sculpture offers a counter-archive to this erasure. Here, trauma does not risk therapeutic foreclosure or narrative resolution; it is not ‘worked through’ or rendered inert. Instead, it is embedded in ruptured materials, intimate objects, and residual traces that refuse assimilation. These sculptural fragments insist on a lingering emotional presence, demanding that the viewer not simply witness, but feel. They defy diagnostic and institutional logics that pathologise or dismiss the 'everyday' injuries of modern life.

Sara Ahmed’s (2010) theory of affective economies deepens this understanding, offering language for how emotion adheres to and circulates through objects. In sculpture, materials become emotional conduits. Tactile remnants absorb and transmit pain, shame, and survival. Emotion, in this representation, is not internal or private, but relational; transferred between object, body, and viewer. The sculptural object becomes an affective apparatus, not merely a static display but a transmission of personal and collective pain. It structures the ways in which sexual trauma is sensed, registered, and remembered.

The concept of haunting, as articulated by Avery Gordon (1997), is also central to this curatorial framework. For Gordon, haunting arises when violence is denied or obscured; when what has been structurally buried returns to disrupt the present. The sculptures in this exhibit do not depict sexual violence directly. Rather, they stage its residue. Through absence, rupture, and trace, they summon what is not visible but viscerally present. At the intersection where the past interrupts the present, sculpture acts as a ghosted witness. It unsettles, disturbs, and interrupts. The political becomes affective; the affective becomes political.

Together, these theoretical frameworks position sculpture as a powerful mode of witnessing, one that renders the invisible visible, interrupts institutional forgetting, and insists on the persistence of harm. Sculpture does not resolve sexual trauma; it gives it form. It makes trauma’s 'ongoingness' tangible, transforming the gallery into a site of affective reckoning, embodied memory, and feminist resistance.

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Figure 3.2. Tate Gallery. 2025. “‘My Bed‘, Tracey Emin, 1998.” Digital online photo. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-my-bed-l03662

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Figure 3.3. Tate Gallery. 2025. “‘My Bed‘, Tracey Emin, 1998.” Digital online photo. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-my-bed-l03662

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Figure 3.4. Tate Gallery. 2025. “‘My Bed‘, Tracey Emin, 1998.” Digital online photo. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-my-bed-l03662

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Positioned at the intersection between confessional art and feminist installation, Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) transforms the language of sculpture into a visceral tableau of sexual trauma. The unmade bed, surrounded by intimate objects - crumpled sheets, blood-stained underwear, used condoms, cigarette butts, and half-empty vodka bottles - externalizes the psychological aftermath of trauma, heartbreak, and depression. This is not a sanitized memorial, but a raw confrontation. The materiality of sculpture allows Emin to articulate what language often suppresses: the embodied experience of female pain and abjection. Installed within a gallery space, My Bed arrests viewers with its unflinching intimacy. The simple mattress contrast with the chaotic refuse around it, which accumulates like forensic evidence. Tate curator Darren Pih describes it as “a crime scene,” where perpetrator and victim collapse into one. Emin’s physical absence paradoxically becomes a haunting presence, echoing Gordon’s (1997) concept of haunting as “the persistence of the something that is no longer.” The work stages a ghosted subjectivity - a woman violated, spiralling, surviving - turning private pain into public art.

While the work is autobiographical, it resists redemption or closure. As Alina Cohen (2018) notes, My Bed does not seek forgiveness; it asserts. The sculpture demands reckoning with invisible suffering. In exposing the aftermath of sexual trauma - rendered through menstrual blood, casual sex detritus, and stains of neglect - Emin challenges the cultural sanitization of suffering. As Ahmed (2010) theorizes, emotions “stick” to objects; here, bodily fluids become affective residues, embedded with memory. They call forth what was felt but could not be articulated, inscribing the private onto the public. The sculpture's immersive materiality offers a distinctive form of storytelling. My Bed does not illustrate trauma; it embodies it. Blurring subject and object, it creates a landscape of aftermath. Viewers become detectives, assembling meaning from material remnants. Crucially, these fragments are given spatial weight; feminine pain and psychological collapse are made tangible. They are made to take up room.

To be in bed, Morgan Meis (2018) writes, is to be in a state of “least defence.” By exposing her bed, Emin monumentalises this vulnerability. Her absence becomes an act of survival; a refusal to conceal or make legible. The bed itself becomes a gendered symbol of vulnerability, where bodies are both desired and degraded (Halconruy, 2022). In doing so, My Bed troubles the public/private divide that often shields female sexual violence from scrutiny. The gallery becomes a site of confrontation. Emin weaponizes domesticity, replacing aestheticized femininity with depressive disorder and idealized sexuality with brutal aftermath. The bed becomes a sculptural battlefield. It asks not only what happened here, but why it remains unspeakable. This is the political urgency of My Bed. It interrupts the fantasy that trauma is exceptional. Aligning with Brown’s (1995) feminist critique of PTSD frameworks, it gestures to trauma’s embeddedness in the everyday: the catastrophe of heartbreak, the terror of bodily invasion, the slow erosion of one's will to live. By collapsing the spectacular and mundane, Emin reveals that violation often occurs in the most familiar spaces, and its residue is invisible to those with the privilege of ignorance.

The power of My Bed lies not just in its physical form, but in its demand for embodied response. The work implicates viewers, disallowing detachment. To feel in front of this bed is to be drawn into relation and become oriented toward pain. And in this relationality lies the possibility of solidarity. Many viewers, Cohen (2018) writes, projected their own trauma onto the piece, transforming it from self-portrait into shared recognition. My Bed does not promise healing; it insists on visibility. And in a world that demands women sanitise their suffering to be seen, that insistence is radical.

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What Were You Wearing? (Jen Brockman & Mary Wyandt-Hiebert, 2013-present)

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What Were You Wearing? (Jen Brockman & Mary Wyandt-Hiebert, 2013-present)

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Figure 3.5. Susan Anthony Project. 2025. "What Were You Wearing?" Digital online photo. https://sbaproject.org/what-were-you-wearing/

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Figure 3.6. Susan Anthony Project. 2025. "What Were You Wearing?" Digital online photo. https://sbaproject.org/what-were-you-wearing/

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Figure 3.7. Susan Anthony Project. 2025. "What Were You Wearing?" Digital online photo. https://sbaproject.org/what-were-you-wearing/

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Figure 3.8. Susan Anthony Project. 2025. "What Were You Wearing?" Digital online photo. https://sbaproject.org/what-were-you-wearing/

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Figure 3.9. Susan Anthony Project. 2025. "What Were You Wearing?" Digital online photo. https://sbaproject.org/what-were-you-wearing/

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Figure 3.10. Susan Anthony Project. 2025. "What Were You Wearing?" Digital online photo. https://sbaproject.org/what-were-you-wearing/

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What Were You Wearing? (2013–present) is an ongoing sculptural installation created by Jen Brockman and Mary Wyandt-Hiebert that transforms the gallery into an affective battleground. First exhibited at the University of Arkansas, the work reframes clothing into a sculptural archive of sexual trauma. Drawing on Mary Simmerling's poem What I was wearing, the work confronts the pernicious logic of victim-blaming by presenting outfits worn by sexual assault survivors at the time of their assault, accompanied by survivors' anonymised written testimonies (Human Services City of Phoenix. 2025). In doing so, it refuses to aestheticize trauma, instead allowing material objects to speak with devastating clarity. The displayed clothing - child-sized dresses, work uniforms, pyjamas, hoodies - hang limply, suspended in space, untethered from the bodies they once adorned. Their very ordinariness becomes jarring. This is not a space of spectacle, but of silent testimony.

As an installation, What Were You Wearing? adopts the language of minimalism: sparse staging, unadorned garments, fragmentary texts. Yet beneath this apparent simplicity lies sculptural intensity. The clothing hovers between object and subject, standing in for absent bodies while refusing to become mere proxies. In this way, the sculpture echoes Ahmed's (2010) understanding of emotions not simply residing within objects or subjects, but emerging in the histories of contact between them. These garments are not charged because of their design, but because of what was done to the bodies inside them. They pulse with affective residue - shame, grief, injustice - not as aesthetic flourish, but as sociopolitical weight. Through this material haunting, the installation enacts Gordon’s (1997) concept of the ghost. Each outfit becomes an echo of what happened, and to whom. Their silence becomes a scream, insisting on recognition and interrupting the viewer’s previous state of ignorant ease. As with Tracey Emin’s My Bed, absence becomes a sculptural strategy; a refusal to perform sexual trauma within palatable, consumable narratives.

This sculpture unsettles the boundary between private memory and public testimony. Clothing, intimate yet external, functions as a liminal object. To witness these garments is to experience what Ahmed (2010) calls an 'orientation': an emotional alignment with another’s pain that is not sentimental identification, but ethical attention. The work refuses the causal logic of rape myths that locate blame in attire, behaviour, or presence. Instead, it gestures toward structural conditions: patriarchy, sexual entitlement, and a culture that makes risk management the responsibility of those most vulnerable. By recreating survivors' outfits using thrift store items, the sculpture draws attention to anonymous repetition (Susan Anthony Project, 2025). Each item could belong to anyone. Each testimony could be someone else’s. There is no singular victim, no singular perpetrator. The violence is systemic. In this way, the installation becomes an archive not of exception, but of accumulation.

As a sculptural space, What Were You Wearing? does not speak on behalf of survivors. It avoids narrative closure, refuses redemption arcs, and privileges aftermath over resolution. Viewers are not permitted to consume, but compelled to confront. There are no bodies, no spectacle, no performance of pain; only what remains. This encounter demands reckoning, not voyeurism, and once again opens the possibility of solidarity through discomfort (Barcomb-Peterson, 2024). Here, sculpture becomes confrontation. An embodied demand to look without objectifying or resolving. A reminder that the issue was never what someone wore, but the culture that used it as justification.

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The Politics of Representation: Sculptural Limits in Testifying to Sexual Trauma

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The Politics of Representation: Sculptural Limits in Testifying to Sexual Trauma

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While sculpture can serve as a powerful artistic medium for materialising sexual trauma and asserting embodied testimony, its capacity to represent such violence is constrained by structural and epistemological limitations. As Hesford (1999) argues, testimonial art occupies a liminal space - neither wholly factual nor fictional - where meaning becomes contingent upon subjective reception. Within this space, the authority to define 'truth' often resides with dominant cultural and institutional forces, rendering artistic representations of sexual trauma vulnerable to distortion or dismissal. The sculptural act, then, is always mediated by the viewer’s gaze, which may reproduce rather than resist hegemonic power relations. In this way, depictions of sexual violence against marginalised groups risk casting spectators into voyeuristic roles, where trauma is consumed as spectacle, and pain is aestheticised into commodity (Hesford, 1999). Consequently, sculpture’s performative qualities can inadvertently convert personal suffering into an object of visual pleasure, undermining its political significance.

Moreover, accessibility remains a critical limitation of sculpture as a medium. Often exhibited within elite institutional settings, sculptural works are frequently subjected to commodification and gatekeeping, excluding the very communities whose experiences they aim to represent. However, as Barcomb-Peterson (2024) notes, some sculptural installations resist these dynamics by remaining open-source and community-driven, affirming that the stories of survivors should not be monetised. Such projects challenge the exclusivity of the traditional art world and call attention to the ethics of spectatorship. Ultimately, while sculpture holds the power to amplify silenced narratives of sexual trauma and contest dominant histories, it remains entangled in the very systems of power it seeks to expose, thereby complicating its emancipatory promise.

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Ahmed, Sara. 2010. “The Promise of Happiness.” Duke University Press.

Barcomb-Peterson, Erinn, and The University of Kansas News. 2024. “‘What Were You Wearing’ Returns to KU April 2-18.” After 10 Years of Bringing Worldwide Attention to Sexual Assault, ‘What Were You Wearing?’ Art Installation Returns to KU in April. 2024. https://news.ku.edu/news/article/after-10-years-of-bringing-worldwide-attention-to-sexual-assault-what-were-you-wearing-art-installation-returns-to-ku-in-april.

Brown, Laura. 1995. Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Cohen, Alina. 2018. “Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’ Ignored Society’s Expectations of Women.” Artsy. July 30, 2018. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-tracey-emins-my-bed-ignored-societys-expectations-women.

Gordon, Avery F. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. NED-New edition, Second. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttt4hp.

Halconruy, Claire. 2022. “The Impact of Tracey Emin’s My Bed.” Artsper Magazine (blog). June 21, 2022. https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/the-impact-of-tracey-emins-my-bed/.

Hesford, Wendy S. 1999. “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation.” College English 62 (2): 192–221. https://doi.org/10.2307/379018.

Human Services, City of Phoenix. 2025. “‘What Were You Wearing?’ Art Installation Shines Light on Sexual Assault.” 2025. https://www.phoenix.gov/newsroom/human-services-news/-what-were-you-wearing---art-installation-shines-light-on-sexual.html.

Meiss, Morgan. 2025. “The Empty Bed: Tracey Emin and the Persistent Self.” Image Journal (blog). 2025. https://imagejournal.org/article/empty-bed-tracey-emin-persistent-self/.

Susan Anthony Project. 2025. “What Were You Wearing?” Susan B. Anthony Project (blog). 2025. https://sbaproject.org/what-were-you-wearing/.

Tate Gallery. n.d. “‘My Bed‘, Tracey Emin, 1998.” Tate. Accessed May 18, 2025. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-my-bed-l03662.