Denym Aphrodyte is an amazing person, great friend, and a vagina painter extraordinnaire. I had the privilege of sitting down and chatting with Denym this week about their motives behind their feminist art pieces: vaginas.
Hometown: Oregon, IL
Major(s)/Minor(s): Communication studies major, Graphic Design minor
Year: Senior
Campus involvement: Delta Chi Theta Sorority, Women’s Track and Field, Observer Multimedia team member
Can you talk to us a little bit about your vagina project and how it all came to be?
So I started graphic design courses last year and I started out with social critique, and it turned into applying my communication studies theory of gender roles that we study, and applying that to my art—and I just started painting vaginas.
In what different ways do you show off these vaginas?
I started painting; I did a lot of drawings, too. Right now I’m working with different media like fabric. But for my coloring book, it’s just hand drawings that I render in the computer and then I put them in pages. They’re all different designs in black and white.
What’s your favorite vagina you’ve created?
I have a piece I’m working on right now that’s on a gold piece of cardboard and it’s painted in black and silver and white. It’s a big vagina with a bunch of lines going through it and stuff like that.
What’s your purpose and/or goal in mind for your audience?
I’d have to say my main goal is to defeat the stigma that’s around how a vagina should look or how girls think their vaginas should look. I remember in health class we only got shown one picture of a vagina, so if your vagina looked different than that everyone thought it was weird or they weren’t normal. So that’s why I paint a different variety of vaginas; different shapes, different sizes, and everything like that so people realize there’s not just one type of vagina.
Where can we see the vaginas?
I don’t know yet—but my SI (Senior Inquiry) is an experimental SI that they’re trying out for the first time, it’s not like any other Communications Studies SI that they’ve done. It’s a visual SI. So I do get to put up pieces of artwork, I just don’t know which ones yet.
Keep an eye out for Denym Aphrodyte’s vagina artwork on the Augustana Campus. In the meantime, you can check out her artwork on their Instagram profile: @devynhalie