Poppy Mannion (b. 2001, Brighton) uses the traditionally gendered media of embroidery and textiles as a method of storytelling about the female experience.

Her practice has always focused on exploring the female, what it is to be a female at different stages of life, and how this is driven by the particularities of the female anatomy. By depicting both the biological and subjective, she strives to tackle preconceptions and understand and present the many facets of the female experience.

The works presented in Mannion’s degree show were a collection of embroidered textile diary entries, pictorial representations of actual entries in her personal diaries. These draw the observer directly into her experience of being a girl, an adolescent, and a woman, a line of enquiry that in particular she found was centred on her self-sexualization and experiences of being sexualized.

Through revisiting her own diaries, a therapeutic act of revelation, she wanted to observe the evolution of her perspectives on female-ness over the years, as well as how she perceived herself, other women, and inevitably, the patriarchy.

Mannion’s final work reclaims her own sense of self and sexuality through her own words, and the process of recontextualization and exploration allowed her to recognise the constancy of misogyny throughout her life.