Wangechi Mutu - Yo Mama (2003)

Wangechi Mutu’s Yo Mama (2003) is a collage that features a reclining female figure, assembled from fragments of glossy magazines and medical imagery. She is pierced through the abdomen by a snake-like spear. The work draws on biblical imagery, in particular the story of the fall from grace in Christianity.

Mutu’s practice often centers on the female body as a contested site, using collage to expose how race, gender, and sexuality are constructed in visual culture. In Yo Mama, she plays with tropes of the femme fatale and the serpent from Biblical myth, but reconfigures them through a lens of Afrofuturist hybridity. The result is an image that is both beautiful and grotesque but invites further consideration (reminding me of Ebony G. Patterson’s works!)

This doubleness reminds me of Susan Sontag’s writing on beauty’s contradictions: how it can never be neutral, always bound up with power. Mutu’s figure is hyper-beautiful, but also split apart, weaponised, stitched from fragments. The work also speaks to material histories: collage as a medium of rupture and fragmentation which feels relevant to how I use mixed media.

For my practice, Yo Mama offers a model of how ornament and violence can coexist, how seductive imagery can be the very surface that unsettles. It pushes me to think about how my own use of whimsy might similarly carry unease, and how material excess can be political rather than decorative. It makes me ask - how can I utilise dissonance, created by beauty?