Not Woman Enough
Not Woman Enough is a shocking, gut-wrenching and snort-laughingly, bare-all conversation into the wonder of womanhood through the lens of three different Asian women.
Role
Set & Prop Design
Year
2023
Venue
Basement Theatre
Mainspace
Creative Team
Presented by Proudly Asian Theatre
Director: Sanada Chatterjee
Playwright: Hweiling Ow
Producer: Natasha Daniel
Lighting: Rachael Longshaw-Park
Sound: Carawei Gao
Stage Manager: Ariadne Baltazar
Premiere Cast: Shervonne Grierson, Isla Mayo, Anjula Prakash
To make the set, I only used second-hand textiles, primarily bras, bedsheets and stockings, which I sourced from opshops. This creative constraint led to many interesting discoveries on ways to transform these ‘feminine’ textiles into biomorphic sculptures that are both beautiful and repulsive.
For me, this really capture the struggle each of the characters have with womanhood: something that is both beautiful and messy, and ultimately human.
I was very much inspired by the term ‘bare all’, taken from the show’s blurb. Each of the three women in the play suffer from a female-related medical condition. This got me interested in exploring rupturing surfaces, cancerous growths and body horror. I took a lot of inspiration from the striking yonic forms of Magdalena Abakonowicz and visceral body horror sculptures of Tina Kim.
“…this almost body horror set-up framed the narrative in a different light. The typical notion of women’s bodies as soft and delicate was redefined as a dripping, chaotic landscape of pink and red ”
“The stage design also encompassed so much of what it feels like to be a woman, of being trapped inside a body that dictates your entire worth - but what happens when this body rebels against you?”
