Vuorio’s work deals with the dynamic manipulation of the female body in art and society, where women have remained in a constant struggle in taking control of their own sexuality, from those whom deem it for her. This conflict against man, the ideal body, and overtly sexualized media have stripped women from their right to express sexuality through their own terms, as their perception of their bodies constantly deviate between that of beauty and disgust.

 

Through combining motifs of disgust and sexuality into various singular artworks, Vuorio aims to pervert the viewers into distorting their own standards of acceptable sexuality. By asserting the presence of the female nude through her body language, eccentric size, and lewd medium, she hopes to mold the female body into a symbol of resistance, and to gain control over her own sexual character. She attempt’s this by using herself as the model, a disabled dwarf whome’s inconventional size contradicts the traditional beauty ideal. These nude repetitions are seen throughout her artistic practice in variouse sizes, some even created to represent the artist’s actual bodily size. The assortment of scale deceives the viewer into coming close or remaining at a distance from the artwork, creating a synergy between that of disgust and perversion.

 

Vuorio sees paint as a medium which allows for an expressive suggestion of varied sexual connotations. By lathering each depiction with thick, dripping, or glossy paint, she expand’s on the unnerving reaction which the properties of paint produces within the viwer. She uses it as a symbolic material for flesh and sex, which she worns onto distinct surfaces, one of them being a plaster body cast of herself; a medium which is often used to create the ideal beautiful body. By tarnishing this imagery of the innocent beauty through defyling its subject and medium, Vuorio questions the aesthetics of beauty and sexuality.

 

Vuorio’s work borrows the ideas and painting styles from variouse renown individuals, individuals whome have all contributed into the assemblage of feminist theory on beauty and sexuality. She has been greatly influenced by the painting techniques of artists Jenny Saville and Francis Bacon, both whome use paint as a symbolic material for human flesh through its application and color. The context of her work borrows various tropes and and material from feminist writers Naomi Wolf (“The Beauty Myth”) and Michelle Meagre (“Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust”), as well as from philosophers Jacques Lacan (“The Mirror Stage”) and Michael Foucault (“Las Meninas”). This is seen through her incorporation or deliberate exclusion or of the female figure’s gaze, the mirror, and a fragmentation of the nude body. By embodying these practices with an uncomfortable medium and subject matter, Vuorio attempts to merge motifs of sexuality and disgust into a singular tier, where the candid perversion of our inner minds are both truthful, and ironic.