I started making Vulva art because I needed to.
When I was in high school I was more than an outcast, never good enough for anyone. Those closest to me flip flopped between my being too fat, too thin, always worried about what I looked like and why I didn’t look like the other girls. From what I could tell, sex made you popular so I sought it and found it in all of the wrong places. I was taken advantage of by older men and was used by the boys in school. In keeping the company I did, I found myself in abusive relationships and humiliating, dehumanizing sexual encounters. I went to a school where we were taught abstinence only sex ed, so I had no idea how easy it was to get STD’s, become pregnant, and all of the other extra’s that go along with irresponsible sex. I learned and many of the scars from those consequences will follow me for the rest of my life. All of that and in the end it didn’t matter. I was still an outcast.

For a long time I didn't think about my Vagina, to avoid feeling all of the things that you feel after all of that. Whenever I thought of my Vagina in any context, I got this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt dirty, I felt useless, I felt ashamed and I felt used, thrown away, I felt like a piece of garbage. Death, sadness and humiliation all lingered there. Traditional counseling didn’t work. I couldn’t shake the shame. So I decided to restructure. I took something I hated and turned it into art, art I thought was beautiful. Slowly I found it wasn’t the art that was beautiful, it was me. I felt completely liberated. Then I started working with a rape crisis center where I was able to recognize how effectively society tells us that:, we should be ashamed by our Vulvas, to be pretty you have to fit one very unreachable standard and to validate your prettiness you need to have sex with men, even if you’re not interested. That is when I started VLL.
We’re here because so many women use porn as their visual reference for what their bodies should look like and they let it determine their self-image. In porn women are chosen based on the shape of their Vulvas and are bleached, dyed, shaved and surgically altered. Porn Vulvas are like Ligers, they do not exist in the natural world. We’re calling BS, using real models to show women there is no standard Vulva, they are all different and perfect as is. Bleaching is NOT required. I hope that my work will inspire all of you to look at women and their bodies differently.