Sarnia de la Maré FRSA Author, Musician, Artist

 Women are taught, very early, that desire is something that happens to us, not something we generate. We are expected to be the stage, not the actor; the landscape, not the storm. Art history prefers women as allegories of desire, never as its engineers. Yet the truth is far more interesting: women are machines of desire — intricate, volatile, recursive, sovereign. Not machines in the patriarchal sense (cold, efficient, programmable), but machines in the mythological sense: creations of circuitry and intuition, marked by pleasure, instinct, history, trauma, power, metamorphosis. Machines that rewrite themselves. For years I sensed this intuitively while writing, while constructing performance personas, while building erotic visual archives that slipped between seduction and subversion. But it was only later — through digital art, feminist theory, and the disobedient erotics of punk — that the idea matured into a framework: the erotic machine as feminist methodology. The ero...

 Beauty, for women, has never been neutral. It is a currency, a weapon, a cage, a performance, a threat, a promise, a provocation, a negotiation, and occasionally — if we’re lucky — a pleasure. But in the history of art, beauty is most often a leash. The feminine body appears in Western art as an object of interpretation rather than a force of creation: gazed upon, worshipped, dissected, idealised, punished. Beauty became a disciplinary mechanism; even now, women are expected to participate in their own aesthetic containment. But what happens when the artist refuses to behave? This question has been at the core of my work for decades. In my early punk years, beauty was something to be rejected outright — a trap, a patriarchal choreography designed to minimise autonomy. I shaved things, ripped things, painted things that were not meant to be painted. My femininity was not something to be displayed; it was something to deconstruct. Later came a more interesting realisation: beaut...