Women-at-Arms
"Women-at-Arms" is an abridged history of the development
of armor from the Philistines to the Last Crusade, adapted
to fit the female body. While it keeps close relations to
historical elements that marked the evolution of armor, as
we know it today, it departs from them anatomically, and
functionally, permitting simultaneously a great artistic
exaggeration. Although originating from historical and literary
descriptions, anecdotes, romanticized events, drawings of
the suit of armor and representations of events, and the
study of actual armor, "Women-at-Arms" remains the aesthetic
articulation and interpretation of a contemporary artist.
"Women-at-Arms" was initiated by the cognition that all
representations of women warriors, including those of Joan
of Arc, depict them in either male armor, or as armed fighters
in a hardly protective dress. On the friezes of the Parthenon,
for example, we see the Amazons fighting the Greeks in flowing
chitons and without any body protection. Only in recent iconography
of the erotic fantasy do we see women warriors wearing a
so-called armor that fits anatomically.
"Women-at-Arms" was initiated by the cognition that all representations of
women warriors, including those of Joan of Arc, depict them in either male
armor, or as armed fighters in a hardly protective dress. Joan of Arc appears
in male armor, for example, in the painting "Jeanne d'Arc at the coronation
of Charles VII", by Ingers (1854), and on the friezes of the Parthenon we see
the Amazons fighting the Greeks in their flowing chitons carrying no body protection.
The earliest portrayal, as far as I know, of a woman warrior in female-shaped
armor, is the poster "Joan of Arc" by Haskell Coffin, commissioned by the United
States Treasury Department during the First World War. Only in recent iconography
of the erotic fantasy do we see women warriors wearing a so-called armor that
fits anatomically. Xena, the contemporary TV amazon, without exclusively addressing
this fantasy, engages in battles dressed in a seductive armor-like costume.
According to Herodotus, the Greeks defeated the Amazons,
the militant race of one-breasted warrior women, at the battle
of Thermodon, by the Black Sea. The Scythians called them "man
killers", and Achilles fell in love with their queen,
Penthesilea, as she was dying under his blow at the siege
of Troy. Nonetheless, warfare was conducted, if not monopolized,
by men. Therefore, it is not surprising that the history
of armor and its evolution refers only to the way men protected
their bodies.
"Women-at-Arms" provides an interpretation of how a female-shaped
armor might have developed if women were equally engaged
in warfare. Such participation, most definitely, would have
demanded an advancement of the female defense coat which
would have been in harmony with the female anatomy and aesthetic.
The sculptures of "Women-at-Arms" depart anatomically and
aesthetically from the male functionality and aesthetic of
the war suit, but they reflect the technological developments,
and historical necessities, which shaped the form and the
appearance of the armor of the portrait periods, thus making
each piece identifiable to the era it belongs.
The representations of women warriors show that male iconography
had either sent women to battle with a lighter defense coat
than that of men, or had dressed them with male armor. Recognizing
the existence, both historical and mythological, of female
warriors in the male arena of warfare, this project celebrates
the female presence by providing an artistic articulation
of the woman's protective dress in war times.
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