I have lived my entire life feeling I had to pay for the right to exist. I am not alone.
When Women Right/Write Their Pain is an installation that gives form to the silenced suffering of women. Through sculptural bodies wrapped in visceral pink, suffocated by plastic, and restrained by societal expectations, the work manifests the violence, shame, and erasure imposed on women’s bodies and voices. The backdrop is a tapestry of words—epithets, accusations, insidious whispers, and the raw reality of violence: rape, murder, strangled. These are not abstractions; they are the lived, brutal truths of women’s lives.
At the center of the installation is an empty bench, engraved with To All the Disappeared Women, a space of mourning, a space of witness. Flowers scatter at its feet, evoking memorial and loss, while the figures—bound, stifled, broken—occupy the periphery, exiled even in death. Their presence is undeniable, yet their agency has been stripped away.
This work is a visceral response to the systemic violence inflicted on women: the burden of survival, the trauma of objectification, the silencing of rage. But it is also a refusal. These bodies remain. They testify. They demand to be seen.
Through material presence and textual invocation, When Women Write Their Pain asks: How do we write ourselves back into history? How do we reclaim the narrative of our bodies? How do we refuse disappearance?
This work is my answer.
—Quin de la Mer
Installation at Newcastle Contemporary Art gallery, February 16-26, 2022
