By Tina Shan
The phonetic title of Cristina Camacho’s /ˈvʌlvə/ seems to capture the vulva just before it solidifies into a signifier, renewing its possibilities of meaning production.
“When the canvas is cut, it opens endless possibilities,” says Colombian painter Cristina Camacho, who weaves intricate patterns into stacked canvases. Her current solo show, /ˈvʌlvə/, at Praxis Gallery — her third since graduating from Columbia’s MFA program in 2015 — evidences an increasingly audacious and masterful play with light, shadow, color, and gravity. Compared to her previous series, which rely more on abstract patterns and geometric forms, /ˈvʌlvə/ blooms with a sense of narrative and symbolism. The canvas seems to have a life of its own, rife with the desire to speak something formerly absent.
For Camacho, this project was born out of a shock that turned into an urgent need to give voice to a word that is rarely uttered outside of medical contexts: vulva. “At age 30, I learned that I had been calling an essential part of my body that defines so much by the wrong name. There is the vulva, and then there is the vagina, which is just the hole.” Camacho gestures emphatically as we talked, seated among her artworks. “The word ‘vagina’ comes from the Latin for ‘sheath,’ into which the sword is placed. That’s it — a completely male-dominated language that talks about the female sex as if it’s just the hole.”
