Secret Women's Business

My daughter brought an encyclopaedia of contraception home for a school project. I was fascinated by the range of shapes and played with them - using fleshy colours for backgrounds, and colours which do not belong I the body in the IUD's.

My son commented that they looked like an explosion in the Barbie aisle. I worry that Barbie is teaching our children the wrong values - a need for a long thin body with big breasts, a wardrobe full of satin gowns, a palomino horse, a caravan, and Ken, forever sealed into his jocks.

In looking for a different symbol of fertility I used images of old symbols - the Venus of Willendorf and others like her. To further emphasise the fertility theme you will find the phases of the moon, quilting to suggest the tree of life in some places and a uterus and ovaries in others, and cowries - symbolising woman in the South Pacific where I grew up.

Photograph by Andrew Sikorski.