To protest the female hygiene luxury tax, I wanted to use a technique that is historically used by women to protest for women. On the sanitary towels I would free machine protest slogans and facts/statistics and then hang them up.

When making these protest sanitary towels, I encountered many problems including dealing with the thickness of the towels themselves which led to many broken machine needles, also due to thickness it meant that it was more difficult to move the needles to create line.

Personally, I like the outcome of these images and think that they are extremely effective in reaching the public and making them aware of the unfair facts about period poverty and the tax.

My main goal was to protest against the female hygiene product tax and to make society aware of ways to resolve these issues, for example: make period products available for free by the government. They should be equally as important as free condoms as women have no choice but to bleed each month.

Inspired by a documentary that I watched based on transgender youth ( I am Jazz)  and their decisions to undergo the bottom surgery (changing their genitalia to fit their gender) I created a piece highlighting the importance of raising awareness and talking about such issues as a lot of people are misinformed and have a lack of understanding. I wanted to capture how these youths felt and almost a sense of their gender dysphoria by using colours that contradict the gender stereotypes and by free machining the opposite genitalia onto the pants.

 

 

I attached many threads onto the end of the tampon, representative of period blood. My aim is to photograph the tampon and create a single image. I could possibly paint gold leaf onto the tampon to make the point of their not being a period tax even clearer.

 

Inspired by the homelessness in Brighton and other research that I had done, I decided to look into what it is like for women for live on the streets without the proper resources they need in order to be clean and have a healthy period.

Through research, it was clear that women who live on the streets face issues that are not unfair for any woman to face. Through my quilt, I want to highlight what these women have to undergo every month, without the proper things that they need.

The quilt uses a variety of different scraps of found and bought red fabric, which is symbolic of the period. I wanted to capture the aesthetics of being homeless by using found fabrics and ones that are worn out/battered.

I then embroidered some facts and stats that I found out about homeless women during their period.

I wanted to strictly use red threads to create type and image onto the quilt however it became difficult to read the type so I decided to use a range of pinks and reds to make the type stand out and legible.

The making of the quilt itself was very difficult due to the thickness of the duvet and because of the movement of the quilt whilst on the sewing machine made It difficult to sew and made the needles snap.

I purposely used bedding and a duvet to make the quilt as these are the items you would mainly associate with being homeless.

The quilt has a variety of imagery including a homeless woman, sanitary towels, and tampons, the anatomy of the female reproductive systems. In the quilt, the slogans that I used was ‘end period poverty’ and many other slogans.