ART WORLD

Labia of love

By Josh Rodgers

A quick double-take confirms it: Yep, those are vagina pillows alright. You know, vagina pillows. Hanging on the wall in Local 188’s new group show are several large, soft and fluffy pillows with realistic vaginas gracing the fronts. Some penises, too, in all fairness.

Kate Prideaux started off making pillows a few years back, borrowing heavily from Hindu and Buddhist mandala motifs (remember that Jung article last week?). Mandalas, she explains, comes in many forms; they’re concentric patterns, symbolizing totality and wholeness, that aid in meditation. “They have a lot of vaginal worship mandalas in India and I started doing that in my work,” Prideaux says. But traditional mandalas are so abstracted it’s sometimes hard to tell from the geometrical shape just what it is.

“I wanted to make it more obvious,” she says. She succeeded.

Prideaux started out sewing 2-D images of vaginas onto her pillows, but soon took a more sculptural approach. “I had been making puppets for like five or six years and they were playful, but I wanted to make a different kind of a statement with the pillows. But keep them inviting and tactile.”

What at first glance may seem to some a little off-putting, soon appear fun and inviting, “a playful thing people could get into,” as Prideaux puts it. The richness and variety of material draws one in. “Victoria” is a crimson affair swathed in intricately patterned upholstery fabric. “Pleather Tuscadero” sports the camp value of fake leather, while “Betty” gets its name from Betty Page, its leopard print cloth conjuring images of the uninhibited girl-next-door from ’50s nudie calendars.

“Monkey Love” opens the scope even wider, pairing a vagina pillow with the show’s only phallus cushion; designed to interact with each other. Kate describes the female counterpart as “aquatic, ocean-like” with the clitoris, pearl-like, ensconced in fabric folds. The male half is good-humored, featuring pictures of monkeys holding — what else — bananas. Both pillows have elements of the same swirling black and white design, suggesting what Prideaux feels is a sort of yin-yang sexual outlook. “You can’t really separate them,” she muses. “I can’t always tell where the female part ends and the male part begins.”

Look, touch, play, say the pillows. Some are filled with candy (red peppermints and cherry red-hots), some are encircled with frizzy fringe, and the testicles jingle when they shake. Might be hard to sleep on them, but they’re more fun than stuffed animals any day of the week.

The pillows show at Local 188 through November 22.