Savannah is interested in exploring and memorializing the relationship between women, girls, time, and trauma. What happens to girls as they age into women that makes them so vulnerable to being taken advantage of? From puberty to adulthood, where is the transition, what does it look like? Savannah traces the line of her own trauma to her childhood self—and asks herself, how did I get from there to here? What parts of the world outside me influenced me to get here? What do I associate with this transition, with girlhood, and womanhood? To answer these questions, she considers the aspects of the socialization and conditioning of women under patriarchy which forces us into this vulnerability. Her work portrays what women’s specific relationship with trauma looks and feels like through the combination of her own experiences with feminine subjects and symbols.
Whether in drawing, print, sculpture, or large-scale installation, Savannah utilizes vivid colors and negative space to form dream-like spaces filled with symbols of femininity. These symbols dually represent seemingly positive patriarchal ideals of femininity and how these ideals are actually detrimental for women. The lexicon includes the Victorian language of flowers, nostalgic childhood objects, things associated with feminine care/lifestyle, allusions to the excessive, grotesque feminine body, and the classical female nude. She references pre-twentieth century representations of women in the Western canon, often appropriating exact poses from classical—always male—masters. Deliberately posed figures narratively interact with these spaces, creating feelings of insecurity, confusion, and anxiety as they move through a projection of her own trauma. She meshes worlds and characters with literature appropriated from similar eras in history, further subverting and obscuring the illusive and traumatic world of femininity.
Ceramic vessels have long been thought to reflect femininity or the feminine form. Clay has been sexualized and fetishized for its allusion to the female body. Savannah uses this to her advantage, as ceramic sculpture encapsulates the feminine form even when it doesn’t look like a woman. Appropriated floral patterns, subdued images of violence against women, as well as hand-drawn and gold luster accents decorate her slip-cast or hand-built forms. Her aim is to communicate the multi-faceted experiences and memories of women through this complex layering of imagery. History and society create a pretty and perfumed mold for women, it hides the ugliness and violence of patriarchy, but still their time deserves to be memorialized and acknowledged.
Using print media, bookbinding, male-created nudes, and male-dictated traditional Western beauty ideals, Savannah critiques historical representations of women. Print has a strong connection to publishing, distributing information, and determining standards and ideals for society; she utilizes this connection to highlight the disparities in these traditional representations. The distribution of feminine ideals actually hurts women and contributes to our collective trauma.
Women are associated with closed-off, domestic spaces; with nature and the low material world. Privacy is bound to femininity; femininity is excessive and grotesque and must be contained, must be kept quiet, erased. The spaces Savannah creates mimic this privacy; they are hidden, mystical, embedded in nature, and fictional.
An overflowing vessel connects to feminine excess. Flowering foliage disguises violence and restriction, creating a nauseating illusion of saccharine sweetness. This world she depicts, a world women are forced into by patriarchy, is detached, suffocated, painful, private, and filled with empty air.
Savannah Ferrell 