Barb Hunt

Heavily influenced by her cultural background of Newfoundland in Canada, Barb Hunt often utilises the Newfoundland craft process as her main media to create her bodies of work. All of her work strong relates to her culture as Hunt juxtaposes typically feminine issues with masculine materials. Creating a broad range of installation pieces. Much of Hunt’s pieces strongly relates to feminism and gender associations which have explicitly influenced society. “I want to feminise the whole world, which is why pink is used so much in her work - to try and make this colour a strong place to be...” (Questions For Crafters). Therefore, Hunt focuses on the re-construction of how feminism is portrayed through creating pieces which show feminine qualities whilst appearing to also show the strength of women. Barb Hunt’s most recent works go into depth on the construction of war and how it has also created gender associations. Hunt’s anti-personnel project of researching on war allowed Hunt to re-construct several materials in order to portray her context of femininity.

Hunt’s 1994 piece, titled Root Dresses was a series of one out of three dresses. The dress displays Hunt’s contrasted use of feminine issues, whilst using masculine materials. Utilising the organic line of the ‘masculine’ material, Hunt creates the body of a dress to show both the strength and quality of women. As appose to constructing the dress from individual sticks, Hunt has enabled the branches to create the dress, which embodies Hunt’s intentions of showing masculine attributes in women. Rather than focusing on colour (much like her other pieces), Hunt utilises the natural colour of steel to again highlight gender associations which have been created in society. Root Dresses identifies Hunt’s strong context of femininity and how the construction of femininity overtime has resulted in a explicit distinction of aspects associated between genders.

Hunt’s 2001-2004 piece titled Incarnate, again encounters gender associations which have been constructed in society. However, focusing on the concept of war as the masculine subject, as Hunt re-created the army uniform by adding in various pink threading throughout the garment. The re-created garment has allowed the association of a soldier’s uniform to completely changed, as through explicit use of pink, Hunt has enabled the piece to show female qualities through a typically male associated garment. Incarnate displays two meanings as Hunt focuses on the affects of war, as well as relating to her concerns on constructions of femininity.

Displaying Hunt’s works, Root Dresses and Incarnate will allow the viewer to perceive Hunt’s focus of construction of femininity through the use of a broad range of issues and materials.