Sex Crazed Urbanites

One of my mother's more unintentionally amusing insults, 'Sex Crazed Urbanites' was the label she gave my cousin and I when we lived in Norwich. No idea why. Probably because we were both unmarried young women with jobs and boyfriends. In a city. 

I created the pink neon ribbon because 'Sex Crazed Urbanites' sounds like a good name for a terrible 1980s female punk rock band.

The ribbon is tied around a neon stationery box containing neatly printed words: also insults my mother hurled at me, usually if I attempted to dress vaguely fashionably, or go out to any unapproved event or venue. Of course, I never knew which venues or events were approved or not - that was entirely dependent on my mother's mood at the time.

The stationery box was inspired by a matchbox of words we found in her jewellery box. I can't remember the exact words, but I remember they were nasty. The matchbox was tucked into one corner of the jewellery box- which, incidentally, was filthy, falling apart, and held the gloomiest jewels in the world.  Inside the matchbox there was a collection of small cards neatly cut from a cereal packet. On the plain side of each one was a single word, immaculately printed in her infant teacher handwriting. 

The font I used for the cards in my piece was chosen for its teacherly appearance, and the pink neon gives it an urban yet feminine vibe. I enjoy the textural contrast between the smooth, brittle plastic of the box and the woven 'zing' of the nylon ribbon.

This piece memorialises the inexplicable; the contrast between my mother's professional and personal lives and her attacks on the embryonic version of independent femininity she saw and abhored in me.

Her horrible verbal abuse gift-wrapped as an emotional legacy to be untied and reworked until it ceases to intimidate.