ARTIST BIO

Coco Warner-Allen is a London based artist who uses her multi-media practise to explore feminist ideas such as the performativity of the feminine and how damaging the current media environment is to girls and women. She is also interested in how beauty and femininity are constructed through both contemporary visual culture and throughout the history of art. Coco works to give a voice for women and draw attention to their viewpoint, one so often ignored and dismissed. She explores and overtly denies the ideals of what a woman should be and brings women’s voices into the public realm. She expresses the often repressed and underrepresented female rage.

Her textile practise is feminine, humorous and excessive. The works take on a diarist format as she explores female identity and traditional concepts of femininity. She draws on her own lived experience of being in a woman’s body in an image obsessed culture as well as addressing the pain that living in a patriarchal society can cause. She aims to reclaim and modernise the female history of textiles and embroidery by engaging in a larger social commentary of what society expects from women, to be sweet, demure and docile. She has a desire to make things embellished, pretty, and frivolous as it reflects what society wants from women. To sit still and look pretty. To focus on what you see in the mirror and not the world. It’s a form of control. To make women want to both be and act smaller.

Her work as a textile artist subverts the traditional use of embroidery as a mode to keep women with their hands busy and minds idle. Her work exploits the delicacy and domesticity of embroidery, beading and knitting yet she produces pieces that watch the spectator back, denying voyeurism and passivity.

The materiality of her pieces also link her work to the modern day by using sequins, beads, ribbons and tulle. She thus provides a connection between the feminine roots of craft and textiles. She aims to engage in the paragone between craft and art by elevating such skills and media which is so often looked down upon as feminine and lowly, not heralded as masculine ‘high art’.

As well as literature-based research, Coco opens up these conversations amongst her own peer group through her collaborative work with Creaming Strawberries to learn first-hand what it means to be a woman today, and the gender based discrimination that they face daily.