Bee Hughes
Bee Hughes is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, and Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture & Communication at Liverpool John Moores University. Bee’s recent research explores embodied experiences through themes including menstruation, everyday rituals and routines, and the feminist tradition of self-examination. Their recent works in poetry and sound art explore repetition and menstrual normativity encountered through online medical advice, considering how these frequently visited sites of medical authority now form part of the everyday experience of menstruation.
Bee has presented their research and exhibited in the UK and internationally, and recently completed their interdisciplinary practice-led PhD ‘Performing Periods: Challenging Menstrual Normativity through Art Practice’ at Liverpool John Moores University. Bee has published on a number of topics, including criticality in illustration, the visual culture of Dracula (Stoker, 1897), and most recently menstrual normativity and menstrual art. Bee’s curatorial work includes collaborative works with Eva Petersen, such as Comfort Zones (2017), CoLab (2018) at Liverpool School of Art & Design, and Periodical (2018), an exhibition of menstrual art and UK menstrual product advertising as part of Being Human festival of the humanities. In 2020 Bee is Artist in Residence at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Institute for Gender Studies at the University of St Andrews.
Bee has presented their research and exhibited in the UK and internationally, and recently completed their interdisciplinary practice-led PhD ‘Performing Periods: Challenging Menstrual Normativity through Art Practice’ at Liverpool John Moores University. Bee has published on a number of topics, including criticality in illustration, the visual culture of Dracula (Stoker, 1897), and most recently menstrual normativity and menstrual art. Bee’s curatorial work includes collaborative works with Eva Petersen, such as Comfort Zones (2017), CoLab (2018) at Liverpool School of Art & Design, and Periodical (2018), an exhibition of menstrual art and UK menstrual product advertising as part of Being Human festival of the humanities. In 2020 Bee is Artist in Residence at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Institute for Gender Studies at the University of St Andrews.
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Papers by Bee Hughes
The soundwork – Un-voiced (2017) – embraces ambiguity, drawing on themes including identity and cultural performance and cultures of performance. The piece combines spoken word with non-vocal sounds, alluding to the various ways our contemporary culture tends to silence or homogenise individual female experiences.
'Incomplete Cycles' (2017) exhibited.
Artistic Statement:
In my Cycles series I use my body as a printing press to produce a new image daily, recording weeks, months and years. Through this process I juxtapose the (occasional) unpredictability of my periods and the soft form of my vulva with the rigid and repetitively structured form of the print – an image usually made by a machine. I aim to highlight the menstrual cycle as a process in flux, as opposed to a like-clockwork and regimented pattern. The daily ritual of making prints eventually becomes a long-term record, establishing a space of resistance to everyday cultural narratives of menstruation.
Curator's Statement:
Exhibitionist is the Vagina Museum’s first pop up art exhibition. It showcases talented artists from around the world. The art displays the myriad of ways the vagina and vulva can be represented and our perceptions of them.
Curated by Florence Schechter
Vagina Museum, hosted by Woodland Creatures, Edinburgh
5-27 August 2017
Inner Space Gallery, New Jersey
6 - 28 May 2017
Curatorial Statement:
The world is almost 50% women.... and 51% of the population of the United States, but for some reason the female gender and the experience of being female is discounted on so many social levels.
This group art show is meant to create a snap shot of "femaleness" in 2017. I am interested in the internal world of today's female and female identifying individuals. What are our struggles? Fears? Joys? Secrets? What are we shouting from the rooftops? I am excited to see a narrative develop through the commonalities and differences of each story, as told through visual representation.
The name and theme of this group show is an intentional double entendre. It is meant to induce the idea of seeing out of and in to, the womb.
About the curator:
The Vagilante is a feminist human rights superhero with a prominent mons pubis. Fighting fear & hatred through joyous resistance.
The soundwork – Un-voiced (2017) – embraces ambiguity, drawing on themes including identity and cultural performance and cultures of performance. The piece combines spoken word with non-vocal sounds, alluding to the various ways our contemporary culture tends to silence or homogenise individual female experiences.
'Incomplete Cycles' (2017) exhibited.
Artistic Statement:
In my Cycles series I use my body as a printing press to produce a new image daily, recording weeks, months and years. Through this process I juxtapose the (occasional) unpredictability of my periods and the soft form of my vulva with the rigid and repetitively structured form of the print – an image usually made by a machine. I aim to highlight the menstrual cycle as a process in flux, as opposed to a like-clockwork and regimented pattern. The daily ritual of making prints eventually becomes a long-term record, establishing a space of resistance to everyday cultural narratives of menstruation.
Curator's Statement:
Exhibitionist is the Vagina Museum’s first pop up art exhibition. It showcases talented artists from around the world. The art displays the myriad of ways the vagina and vulva can be represented and our perceptions of them.
Curated by Florence Schechter
Vagina Museum, hosted by Woodland Creatures, Edinburgh
5-27 August 2017
Inner Space Gallery, New Jersey
6 - 28 May 2017
Curatorial Statement:
The world is almost 50% women.... and 51% of the population of the United States, but for some reason the female gender and the experience of being female is discounted on so many social levels.
This group art show is meant to create a snap shot of "femaleness" in 2017. I am interested in the internal world of today's female and female identifying individuals. What are our struggles? Fears? Joys? Secrets? What are we shouting from the rooftops? I am excited to see a narrative develop through the commonalities and differences of each story, as told through visual representation.
The name and theme of this group show is an intentional double entendre. It is meant to induce the idea of seeing out of and in to, the womb.
About the curator:
The Vagilante is a feminist human rights superhero with a prominent mons pubis. Fighting fear & hatred through joyous resistance.