She Was Asking for It
She Was Asking for It
By Myriam Thomas
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Item details:
52 x 52 x 2 cm
In this artwork, I investigated how centuries-old stories such as the Greek Medusa myth, have a strong component of victim blaming, and how these victim-blaming stories still find an echo today in the ways men and women often react to gender-related violent crimes.
"She had been drinking too much", "She was flirting", "She was dressed defiantly", "She shouldn't be out on the street so late" etc...are all variations on the narrative in the Medusa myth, where the victim (Medusa) is blamed and even demonized after she was raped, and the aggressor is left out of the picture. By taking this angle, Medusa, for me, suddenly becomes a strong, pained woman who gets my full sympathy and solidarity.
About Myriam Thomas
The art career of Myriam Thomas developed organically. As an 18-year-old she asked herself: "Am I going to choose art or am I going to choose science?” Belonging to the first generation to get the chance to study further, she chose sciences and she became a chemistry teacher, with a lot of commitment and enthusiasm.
However, her desire to develop her artistic language remained, and at some point, she began to experiment at home with waste glass more or less intuitively in a homemade primitive kiln. Very soon she realized that she had to look for a good glass art education, so she decided to enroll in the Glass Art Department at the Institute for Arts and Craft (IKA) in Mechelen, Belgium. There she graduated in 2020 and since then she has worked as a professional glass artist.
The themes that form an inexhaustible source of fascination and inspiration for Myriam almost always have to do with stories. Old stories and new stories- and about how they determine our identities. In each of her artistic projects, she tries to transform her ideas and emotions into glass creations that invite the viewer to moments of rest, reflection, and contemplation.
Myriam has built up a stock of glass techniques from which she draws depending on which story, which emotion she wants to convey. She likes especially to work with stains and kiln-fired paints and with cyanotype on glass, which is a photographic procedure from the beginning of photography.