Girdle
2025.11.07 - 2025.12.20
Artist: Bethany Stead
Curator: Qinru ZHOU
“Girdled by the belly, girdled by the trunk. Big is never small, but small is always big, relative to the size of one’s eye.”
“I fasten my top button and rearrange my collar so it thinly slices the neck. Lapel unstitched, laced socks dissolved into skin, arms bandaged, legs wrapped. Lying in a grey cylinder tank, the steps removed.”
“We wait to be filled. My belly, this tank, the sky. After patience, after layers shed, I am tall enough to see land again. “
“The air hums.”
Bethany Stead's artistic practice constitutes a sustained rite of deconstruction centered on the body. This exhibition, “Girdle”, employs the potent historical metaphor of the girdle — a garment imbued with symbolism — to construct a multi-layered dialogue between constraint and liberation. It seeks to explore a central question: when the body becomes a site of discipline, how can art facilitate a spiritual breakthrough?
Stead's methodology is rooted in Jacques Derrida's idea of Deconstruction and Mary Douglas's concept of the "two bodies." In her surreal figures, the boundary between body and garment is radically blurred; the skin itself is rendered as a textile stitched onto the torso, its "stitches" appearing perpetually ready to be unstitched. This serves as the most direct visual translation of Douglas's theory: how the discipline of the social body profoundly shapes and constrains our perception of the physical body. Here, the girdle manifests both as a tangible presence — in bandaged limbs, collar-as-blade, and lace stockings dissolving into skin — and as an abstract concept: the shaping of the body by social norms and the disciplining of desire by religious edicts.
The artist's aim is not to eradicate opposition but, as she states, to "challenge the traditional hierarchies of binary oppositions in Western thought." She carves out an ambiguous narrative space within the fissures between control and chaos, the sacred and the profane, the interior and the exterior. This philosophy is fully realized in her narrative treatment of materials: handmade paper pulp sags and cracks like parchment, refusing clear borders; canvases stretched taut against the wall suggest disciplined modes of viewing; and sculptures acting as "reliquaries" become archaeological evidence of bodily experience. This is especially evident when the hard-edged relief of ceramics mimics the softness of frilled socks, or when tightly gridded motifs reveal unexpected slippages—the perpetual struggle between control and chaos is made manifest. Thus, abstract concepts are transmuted into tangible visual forms.
The "Girdle" does not seek to portray a pessimistic vision of confinement. Rather, through Bethany Stead's imaginative and critical visual language, it reveals the body's complexity as both a battlefield and a medium. The exhibition ultimately points towards a possibility beyond binary opposition: constraint and liberation are not simple antitheses but intertwined forces, each defining the other. In the end, as "the air hums," we perceive a tremor at the critical point — a moment, after all discipline and metamorphosis, where the potential for re-knowing the self and the world is being awakened.
