The Power of Yoni Art

Yoni art by women artists fascinates me, not only because of its aesthetic appeal and diversity, but also because there is social, political, and spiritual significance and consequence to women artists making art about their own bodies despite the climate of hostility and inadequacy that their freedom induces in society. The frequency of women creators making yoni art can be seen as a barometer for the general sense of power women wield, for how women feel about the beauty and beautification of their anatomy. It is also a measure of their boldness in reclaiming the yoni or vulva from its hyper-sexualization in pornography fixated on men’s desires or hyper-derisive narratives in many societal circles about the inherent inadequacy of women's inner, private worlds. I use ‘boldness’ intentionally because the naked vulva both transfixes and perplexes humanity. The power of yoni art is not only in the controversy that it stirs, but also in the discomfort that it produces among audiences which is a necessary catalyst for their personal and collective transformation.

As Tobin (2023) notes,

“At first inspection, it’s easy to mistake vulva art as gratuitous for the sake of generating deliberate outrage. What, after all, is a better way to get people talking about your work than engendering controversy? But Courbet, Notari, and the works of countless other artists dig much deeper than that. The phallus has remained a dominant fixture in art throughout history…The vulva, however, remains ever taboo, ever explicit, ever the subject of censorship.”

One infamous contemporary vulva intervention that has produced global shockwaves is Brazilian artist Juliana Notari’s Diva (2021), made with the support of the Art Factory and the Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães – MAMAM (Recife)

Diva is

“a sculptural installation in concrete, painted with resin in a burning red colour, 33 metres long, 16 metres wide and 6 metres deep, positioned on the slope of a slight hill, which makes it possible to see the work from great distances. It looks like a woman’s vulva” (Pottier, 2021).

The artwork is situated in the lands of a former sugar planation, a monoculture of the iconic sugar-alcohol industry of the Brazilian state that has been replaced by an artistic-botanical park called Usina Santa Terezinha that features a dozen large installations (Pottier, 2021).

Juliana Notari, Diva (2021)

Here are Notari’s reflections of this work on social media:

“In the midst of so many rocks in the middle of this dystopian year, I finally finish the year with the Diva work done!! It was a long process, almost 11 months of a lot of persistence, living together and learning.Diva at the end is a large hand made sculpture. As Roberto demonstrated the [] engineer responsible for the work…It was not possible to use an excavator, because it would not allow to carve accurately the reliefs that I needed. So, it took more than 40 hands to make Diva born, more than twenty men working in a herculean effort under the sun, in the midst of much music and joke.Diva is a Land Art, a huge vulva/wound-shaped excavation measuring 33 meters high, 16 meters wide and 6 meters deep, covered with reinforced concrete and resin. In “Diva,” I use art to dialogue with issues that relate to gender problemization from a feminine perspective coupled with a cosmovision that questions the relationship between nature and culture in our phallocentric and anthropocentric western society. Currently these issues are becoming increasingly urgent. Ultimately, it will be through changing the perspective of our relationship between humans and between human and non-human that will allow us to live longer on this planet and in a less unequal and catastrophic society” (Notari, 2020).

I look at this bold artwork and I imagine the immense sense of peace I would feel sitting down on the steps of the labias quietly contemplating life or even walking in the crevice as I have seen people do in pictures. I will go so far as to write that every city should have a playground with a concrete vulva like this one that reminds all visitors that many of the children at play on or near it were brought into life through the portal represented by this work of art. It was certainly through this portal that they were conceived.

The power of Diva is not just in its color, size, placement, or configuration, it is also in the interaction of the concrete with the living land that surrounds it, with the living, monoculture grass that frames it in a former monoculture field, in the undoubtedly idiosyncratic and emotional responses that it evokes in its viewers. Diva’s power is in the concrete that was poured into a wound in Mother Earth, creating a multi-faceted representation of how Mother Earth gives life, how mothers give life, how Mother Earth is wounded, and how mothers are wounded. The social, political, and spiritual significance of Diva, its philosophical potential to inflame arrested thinking and ignite open, inquisitive minds is profound. I will follow these brief reflections with a more sustained analysis of this piece and the diversity of yoni art next time.

Works Cited:

Tobin, Katie (2023). What of the vulva in art? Elephant (6 December). Retrieved from: https://elephant.art/what-of-the-vulva-in-art/ on 31 August, 2024.

Notari, Juliana (2020). Diva. Facebook. Retrieved from: https://www.facebook.com/juliana.notari/posts/10219401789651753 on 31 August, 2024.

Pottier, Marc (2021). Juliana Notari revolutionizes Usina de Are with Diva. Umbigo Magazine (22 January). Retrieved from: https://umbigomagazine.com/en/blog/2021/01/22/juliana-notari-revoluciona-a-usina-de-arte-com-diva/ on 31 August 2024.