Group shows | Articulate

My soft sculpture aims to unsettle viewers by creating ambivalent tensions between meta-themes such as sex and death, mobilising unresolvable tensions between the desirable and the abject body. By deliberately depicting intimate parts of the body and emphasising sexual connotations through combinations of shapes, colours and surfaces, I strive to represent personal conflicting feelings related to an erotic, attractive body image confronted with associations to failure and ageing. My choice of private themes, which are rooted in highly personal narratives, aim for an emotional connection with the viewers’ memories. However, as eroticised, violated doubles of the viewers’ selves, these bodies might also appear uncanny or abject and excavate repressed sexual feelings from the unconscious. By using abstracted bodily forms and soft materials and being a woman artist, I translate highly personal and complex experiences into artistic forms that push back against familiar cultural forms, representational categorisations, and normative readings concerning traditionally defined gender roles such as stereotypes of femininity.

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Merciless, felt, gold stitching, 42x42x32cm, 2025 (wall hung) $470.
Be Some Body, felt, gold stitching, 51x26x20cm, 2025 (wall hung), $430.
Boobs are Dancing, felt, gold stitching, satin fabric, 37x43x19cm, 2025 (plinth) $450.
Dance with me, felt, gold stitching, gold thread, metal, 26x26x125cm, 2025, (hung), $460.
She never dances alone, felt, gold stitching, gold thread, metal, satin fabric, 45x45x85cm, 2025 (hung), $460.

Kirsten Drewes is a German born, Sydney based artist. Her soft sculpture work reflects her practice-led research of her PhD at UNSW AD titled "Conflicting Resonances: Soft Forms and Materials in Contemporary Art", where she examined connections between Freudian psychoanalytical concepts used in Surrealism and contemporary soft sculpture. By using abstracted bodily forms and soft materials and being a woman artist, she translates highly personal and complex experiences into artistic forms that push back against familiar cultural forms, representational categorisations, and normative readings concerning traditionally defined gender roles such as stereotypes of femininity.