MUMA

• Her commanding busts and figurines and large textile wall hangings are telling stories about ancient civilisations or adventurers who sailed the seas in search of new lands.
• So’s ceramic objects and “knitted paintings” not only look contemporary, they also challenge orthodoxies about our colonial histories, male authority, gender representation and women’s bodies.
• Provenance, now at the Monash University Museum of Art, brings together more than a decade of So’s artworks.

Long beards, boots and booze

• Repeating motifs of beards and boots are used to explore outward symbols of masculinity, entitlement and military power.
• However, a series of large, knitted motifs of male dominance are humorously undercut by the introduction of booze.
• In Nightfall, the initial threats of the goose-stepping boots embellished with caricatures of bearded faces are neutralised by repeating, reversing and upending a mirrored set of legs.

Internal symbols and female bodies

• So combines a visual language developed from figurative representations from the past with new visualisations of female anatomy drawn from Australian urologist Helen O’Connell’s work mapping the hidden shape of the clitoris using MRI technology.
• So links this knowledge of the clitoris with ancient depictions of Venus, often equated with fertility.
• While similar in bulk and form to her masculine objects, her female archetypes have greater agency.

Old with the new

• So’s survey exhibition tracks the development of her complex visual language and illustrates how she draws on the origins of new and old cultural objects to communicate her messages.
• Figurative ceramics, one of the oldest forms of art making, are contrasted with the creative outputs from the new technology of a knitting machine.