Vulva artist transforms Colorado women's vaginas into body-positive art

Jamie McCartney, creator of The Great Wall of Vagina, casts American women for new work and says of the message behind his famous plaster casts: ‘You’re normal. Whatever you’ve got down there, leave it alone’

The British artist Jamie McCartney has set out to quell anxieties about female body image. This month, the artist cast dozens of women’s vulvas in Boulder, Colorado, to create a new sculpture. His working process was broadcast live on the internet during the week-long Red Tent Revival, a free online festival for women.

“Don’t change your parts, change your partner,” is McCartney’s adage. When he learned years ago that labiaplasty, or the surgical reduction of the labia, is one of the fastest growing surgeries in the UK and the US, he thought: “I like labia! ... This is fascism. This is the industries who are invested in making women feel shit about themselves.”

He then spent five years creating his best-known work, The Great Wall of Vagina, a 26-foot-long, self-funded sculpture of 400 plaster casts of vulvas. His aim was to show the world that women’s nether regions come in all shapes and sizes.

The massive sculpture, completely white, commands gravitas and avoids racial distinctions or the pornographic connotations sometimes associated with nude photography. It is composed of 10 panels of 40 vulvas; each square is an individual portrait, as unique as a face. McCartney’s wall is both spectacular and educational: it functions as catharsis or empowerment for the women who helped create it – ranging from a 76-year-old grandmother to 18-year-old twins – and exposes viewers to the near-infinite variety possible in genital anatomy.

Cosmetic genital procedures with no medical purpose were recently attacked in a report from the British home affairs select committee, which called to extend female genital mutilation law to ban “designer vagina” surgeries. Labiaplasty is largely unregulated and has unknown long-term effects, while patients often lack knowledge of how infinitely diverse women’s labia are.

“There’s nowhere to go for information [on the vulva], so someone can easily be persuaded for surgery ... If you look at medical texts of genitals, they’re not very broad, so TGWV presents 400 women and what you see is that someone in there’s going to look a little bit like you,” said McCartney. “It’s effective in combating the messages that are coming from plastic surgeons, saying ‘You’re defective if you don’t have a child-like [vulva].’ Only about 5% of the casts meet that ‘perfect’ ideal. I don’t think 95% of women are defective. That’s not possible.”

McCartney’s wall was last exhibited in 2013 at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. The artwork is currently sitting in crates in his studio, gathering dust. After the Italian show, McCartney got interested in other projects and hadn’t begun searching for a permanent location to house it until recently. “I don’t want to exhibit in a sex museum,” he said. “It’s not about sex; it’s just anatomy. For me, it’s a serious artwork and it should be in a serious museum.”

However, TGWV is not unproblematic. The word “vagina” is anatomically incorrect, ignoring the visual aspect of female genitalia, the labia and the clitoris. Linguistically, it keeps the focus on heterosexual male pleasure, but McCartney says that he used “vagina” because he wanted a humorous title that uses common parlance in order to reach as many people as possible. “Would I call it The Great Wall of Vagina now? I don’t know.”

Additionally, “one common comment is: ‘They’re all shaved!’ You can’t cast hair, so on one level it’s misrepresentative – suggesting that everyone’s shaved.” Hairlessness is, after all, an essential element of the prevailing porno-Barbie aesthetic which can lead to anxiety about genital appearance, and which McCartney had initially sought to critique. However, the artist is addressing these inherent issues in his more recent work. In one section of his ongoing project, The Sum of Our Parts, he features the natural pubic area, utilizing new media (a document scanner) to create portraits comprised of individual body parts.

The new vulva panel will remain in Boulder as part of the annual women’s event, and discussions with galleries are under way for a possible public viewing. Back in Brighton, volunteers from all walks of life are being cast for McCartney’s other project, Mondcivitano – The Women of the World. The title, meaning “citizen of the world” in Esperanto, comes from the peace boat McCartney worked on before he attended art school in the US. His goal is to make a giant panel featuring a woman’s vulva from every country of the world, but he doesn’t stop there. His webshop offers a do-it-yourself kit to create your own wall, or become the Cynthia Plaster Caster – the groupie who took casts of rock stars’ penises – of the vulva.

After years of talking with women about their bodies while making his art, McCartney believes that female body perception is getting healthier. “A lot of vagina and vulva artworks are going on. It’s almost like a movement. When I started this back in 2006, no one was talking about it. Saying the word ‘vagina’ in public – people were going to turn around at the pub. Now they don’t.” He said one of the main messages of his work is simply: “You’re normal. Whatever you’ve got down there, leave it alone.”

• This article was amended on 1 April 2015. The Boulder show cast dozens of women rather than hundreds. A similar exhibition of porcelain sculpted vulvas at Mona, wrongly attributed to the same artist in the piece due to an editing error, is by Greg Taylor.

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