"My subject is the rawness of emotions, the devastating effect of the emotions you go through. The materials are my means. They serve me, I'm not there to serve them."
Louise Bourgeois.

My body is an emotional place. It is a territory that demands perfection. The desire for taut, smooth, and polished flesh overwhelms as we anxiously wax, shave, deodorize and exercise our collective female bodies; however, I am far from perfect. In fact, I'm hungry.

I spend my time daydreaming of the body beautiful, yet this body is infected. It's infected by culture, by expectations. I feast upon a multicoloured banquet of contradictions, devouring blood stained cotton candy and vomit-iced cupcakes as bile filled balloons dance and ooze around me. My body eats and eats and eats but as I ingest, I feel something desperate to get out, something vile, something horrifying, something I wish to deny.

As a reflection of my body, my painting is consumed by contradictory worlds; the sweet and feminine, the abject and the horrific. Seductive, syrupy and sickly, the palette is integral to the reading of my paintings. With colours identifiable with femininity, like saccharine pinks and bloated purples, I desire to beautify the aspects of the body we're forced to hide.

My process involves pouring paint, harnessing and exploiting its liquid properties to simulate bodily fluids like puke, puss, shit, saliva, bile and blood. These expulsions frighten us inciting shame as we clamour desperately to contain them. The abject nature of the body reminds us that we are material, mortal beings and no boundary exists between what we release from our bodies and what our bodies contain.

Examining, celebrating and scrutinizing the female body from the inside out, my work straddles the realm that holds the body together and the one that tears it apart.

Nicola Bendrey, 2009.