Vanessa Karin

Vanessa Karin works across animation, painting and embroidery. Often blending these media in her hybrid works, Karin traces the impossible expectations put upon women’s bodies. In The perfect girlfriend and her unattainable self (2023), Karin makes societal standards and fetishes explicitly clear, rendering her own body in oils, then embroidering a hyper-sexualized doll-like figure on top of her own. The gaps between these two figures expose the seedy relationship between desire and infantilization which run through manga and hentai. Other works such as www (2023), see the artist embroidering pornographic cartoons and smothering them in rich golden paint, referencing perhaps the excess of fetishist media available online. Working in a similar vein to radical feminist artists such as Hannah Wilke or Linder Sterling, Karin interrogates societal structures oppressing women in the contemporary, using her own adept mastery of animation to reveal its sinister potential.