This work is raw, unfiltered, and unflinching. It speaks of transformation, the shift from childhood to womanhood, and the weight that follows. A body is no longer just a body. It becomes something to be watched, assessed, and controlled. This work carries the echoes of pain, the process of growth, and the will to survive.

I have lived this. This is not an idea, not a metaphor. It is my experience made tangible, carved into form. The materials are fractured, cut apart, and torn, just as I have been. Wood, metal, and resin bear the memory of damage. The process of making reflects the feeling of growing into a body that no longer belongs to itself, no longer feels like home. This work is a scar, but it is also reclamation, shaping something personal into something unshakable.

The weight of self-inflicted harm lingers here. The echoes of cutting, breaking, and snapping remain. The surfaces bear witness to what has been lost and what has been taken back. Splintered wood, jagged edges, layers peeled away. The marks remain, but there is also care. Resin smooths over the wounds, sealing them like old scars, always present, never erased. The red wax is placed with intention, an opening, a wound, a mark of love. There is tension in the contrast, the uneasy meeting of pain and tenderness, harm and healing.

Texture holds the story. The torn veneer, rough beneath the fingers, speaks of external and internal wounds. Metal, cold and unyielding, meets the warmth of wood. Fragility and strength do not cancel each other out. They exist together. This is what it is to have a body. To be soft and unbreakable. To be wanted and discarded. To be held with care and controlled without consent.

There is a force in being shaped into something you never chose. The exhaustion of being seen but not known. This piece does not offer easy answers. My body has been pressed into the wood, leaving a trace of something that cannot be undone. It carries the weight of being shaped by expectation, by hands that were not my own, by rules never spoken but always understood. This is about power. About loss. About what happens when the body is no longer yours to define.

Bodily autonomy is threatened. Women's bodies are controlled, legislated, and turned into objects. The gaze is unrelenting, dissecting, and inescapable, amplified through screens, through surveillance, through the culture itself. This work does not merely reflect these realities. It embodies them. It demands space. It holds its own gaze. It refuses to be ignored. And in this act of making, I reclaim what is mine. My hands, my story, my body as I choose to tell it.

Many artists explore gender, objectification, and self-perception, but this piece speaks in a language of material and form. Wood, long associated with craft and stability, is made fragile, unstable, and exposed. Destruction becomes creation, not an abstract idea but something deeply lived. This work carries the memory of self-inflicted wounds, but also the act of survival.

This is not just about my body. It is about everybody that has been turned into an object. Every version of myself, who I was, who I am, and who I might have been. Every body that has been marked, controlled, and claimed. It is about taking back what was stolen. The weight is not only in the process of making but in the truth it exposes. These materials exist in defiance. They bear their damage, but they also persist.

Love and pain exist together in this work. Love for what my body could have been. Love for what it has endured. Grief for what was taken. These feelings do not cancel each other out. They sit side by side, just as they do in life. The scars remain, but so does the care.

This is not just a piece of art. It is a body in itself, living, breathing, holding its history in every mark and break. It does not ask for permission. It does not seek approval. It exists because it must. And that is why it matters. This is what I need to learn.