‘Abasement diptych’ shows VHS tape of film director Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of playwright William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew that Heather Horrocks has crocheted into a scold’s bridle to symbolise centuries of systemic patriarchal abuse of women.
We two older artists, collaborating as ISOyoh on unceded Wadawurrung land in regional Victoria, pair an absurdist interpretation of this humiliating and painful instrument of punishment with a portrayal of Medusa, a mythological woman of apotropaic powers whose face appears on doors, floors, scarves and tattooed skin. Her story is as problematic as our attitude to the vilified, legless snakes that swarm her head. Is she angry? Fearful? Frustrated? Exhausted by the wars we women fight?
Our use of close focus and desaturated colour takes you from the medieval to the modern in a heartbeat.