Her Life, My Life is a monumental contemporary sculpture exploring female autonomy, liberation, and embodied agency.
Her Life, My Life presents a suspended female figure whose inverted orientation recalls the form of a reversed cross. At four meters high, the sculpture establishes a physical encounter in which the viewer looks upward toward a body that is both exposed and assertive. The scale and position of the figure create a sense of confrontation, placing the viewer in relation to a presence that cannot be overlooked or diminished.
The cross, rooted in Christianity, becomes a point of entry into a wider reflection on the systems that have shamed, confined, or silenced women, systems that still shape the present. The inverted cross was traditionally a sign of Saint Peter’s humility and later associated with rebellion and anti-clericalism. The figure’s inversion functions as a structural reversal of the systems that have defined the female body across centuries. The work proposes inversion as a method of transformation, a literal turning over that exposes the instability of systems treated as natural or no longer present. Her unbound hair signals a shift toward freedom, defined by agency over one’s own body and mind. The female body appears here as a site where historical, cultural, and institutional pressures accumulate.
The work also considers the quieter mechanisms through which shame persists. In Dutch, terms such as schaamlippen (“lips of shame”) used to describe women genital parts show how moral judgment is embedded in language, shaping perception before the body is seen. These residues stem from religious frameworks that positioned the female body within moral scrutiny. Although these systems may appear distant, their residues remain in everyday behaviour. The sculpture brings these inheritances into view and presents a body that is freeing itself from it.
