In 2016, I travelled to Kenya to conduct academic field work and met young Kenyan-Somali women activists who were trying to change the minds of their elders on the practice of female genital mutilation/ cutting (FGM/C). The Somali community has a 98% prevalence rate for FGM/C and usually conducts the most extreme form of this practice, infibulation. During a second trip to Kenya that year, I also met a survivor, Maryan Sheikh, who was running for political office in Northern Kenya. We struck up a friendship and seven years ago, I asked her to collaborate with me on an album against FGM. I later applied and was awarded Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts grants for the project. After I got the grants, I had money to bring on more artists.

 

There is currently twelve of us, a well-known rapper from the Gambia who has won awards for her music activism in support of gender-equality, Awa Femcee Bling, a rapper from Nigeria who is a tour de force poet, Oyereyi, Maryan herself who completed a track telling her story, a vocalist and composer from Malaysia, Ashikin Anwar, a rapper from Georgia in the US, Cole Mize, and amazing music producers from Gambia, Nigeria, UK, US, and Canada. The album is called, 'Budding Orchid Apartheid' and was globally distributed in May 2025. The orchid is the flower of the vulva. The album addresses FGM, but also defiantly celebrates women's sexuality. The album includes rap, singing, and spoken word backed by soul music. The primary reason that FGM is practiced is to control women's sexual experiences and to discipline women to cultural mores.

 

The first-hand accounts of this practice are utterly harrowing. 11,000 girls per day are cut across the world in 32 countries. There are over 230 million women and girls living today who have undergone cutting in some form. This happens in Canada, and for Canadian girls during the summer when they are taken to their home countries to be cut. My work on this project has galvanized my interest in protecting and honoring the vulva. Four years ago, I started making and selling abstract vulva art. Through my visual art, I began to build friendships with other vulva artists.

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Within this community, there are several well-known and well-respected artists. Inspired by a fellow artist from Australia, Katie Lloyd, I decided last summer to open a bricks and mortar art gallery dedicated entirely to the vulva. Women across the world widely report feeling shame and inadequacy about their vulvas. One of the central objectives of this space is to help us, as a society, move away from the monolithic forms presented by pornography, and the ubiquity of the male-gaze that defines for women what is desirable and acceptable, and to normalize the diversity of women's vulvas. I do think that we are slowly getting ready to have these conversations. Most of the vulva art that will be exhibited is made by women artists, some is anatomical, but mostly abstract, and mostly presented without a connection to a body. It is important to me that given the ubiquity of pornography that the gallery does not recreate those visual representations.

 

In addition to original and print art, the gift shop has vulva-inspired jewelry, soap, candles, crystals, decorations, and pottery. Our community space can be booked for activities such as yoga, dance, meditation, activism, breast-feeding, etc, and our fully renovated basement can be booked by art teachers to run workshops for modalities such as stained glass, pottery, macramé, painting, etc.

 

This will be an inclusive space. The story of this gallery started with #FGM advocacy, but there is space for anyone living with a vulva in this world to be centered and heard.

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Melissa Finn