Story via Arshia Simkin, The Underline, Orange County Arts Commission
Sometimes you have to be in the right place at the right time. That’s what happened to Diana Newton, a local Carrboro artist who specializes in sculptures. Before her retirement in 2019, Newton had spent a decades long career in psychotherapy and leadership development consulting. After retirement, Newton became involved in local politics but ultimately found it unsatisfying. By happenstance, she sat on a bench that had a quote from Japanese pop artist Yayoi Kusama inscribed above it and upon reading the words, Newton felt inexplicably moved. The quote said: “Every time I have a problem, I have confronted it with the ax of art.” So Newton took up the ax and got to work; now, she considers herself an artist-activist who uses sculpture to examine female oppression in its myriad forms.
Diana adjusts Furiana’s crown.
Newton has created what she terms a “a sculptural protest” titled “The Three Sisters of Roe.” The first sculpture—“Furiana”—came to her in a sketch, after visiting Chinese fashion-artist Guo Pei’s couture collection, L’architecture, in San Francisco. After the show, while she was at dinner, Newton drew a woman in Tudor garb who was about to burst into flame. Newton had no formal visual art training but, inspired by Pei’s collection, which primarily used mannequins, she ordered a mannequin to be delivered to her home while she was still in San Francisco.
With her burst of flame-red hair, Furiana resembles Elizabeth I but her face and hands—the only parts of her body that are exposed—are black. The color choice was significant for Newton, representing rage, desiccation, and the fact that the denial of reproductive rights is particularly damaging to women of color. There are further layers of meaning embedded in the sculpture: Elizabeth I was the so called “Virgin Queen” whose power “depended on her virginal status,” Newton said. Newton said she wanted to “echo but transform” Elizabeth I: hence, she incorporated many natural elements into the work, including matches in her bodice, herbs that were traditionally used in herbal teas, a snakeskin neckpiece instead of the customary lace of the Tudor era; strikingly, Furiana’s crown is formed from a coat hanger and adorned with hot peppers and her red hair is fashioned from copper coils. Newton said that these natural elements force us to ask: “what do women turn to when they don’t have legally sanctioned means of reproductive freedom?”
Detail, “Furiana” by Diana Newton
Furiana has appeared in several exhibits and placed “Best in Show” in the 8th Annual COLORS International Online Art Exhibition. She was paired with a poem by Hillsborough poet Tori Reynolds for the 3rd Annual Coalesce exhibit at the Eno Arts Mill Gallery (view the broadside here and stop by the gallery to purchase a copy).
Newton wants the Three Sisters to “show a personal and political pathway for women who have been denied their reproductive freedom. So there are three themes involved in the installation…rage, rights, and revelation,” she said.
The remaining two sisters are still works in progress, which Newton hopes to complete by the end of the year. The second figure—“Minerva”—evokes the Suffragette era, with period graphics on the papier-mâché of her skirt and a voting machine under the bustle of her dress. “It’s a way of women finding a way to turn action into political power,” Newton said. The third figure—who will be called “Sophia”—is “a post-patriarchal, completely freely embodied women that we don’t even know what that will look like,” Newton said.
Even before Newton happened upon Kusama’s galvanizing quote, she had always been drawn to self-expression and activism: in 2004, she created a documentary film, The Ties That Bind, which Newton described as “a personal memoir…about my family’s adaptation to my sister’s gender transition.” Newton said: “It was really very difficult to make but it was a very meaningful film to put out in the world right about the time that the state bill HB2—what was known as the bathroom bill [was in effect].”
I asked Newton why she was drawn to art as an expression of her activism. She said: “Art in its many forms…while it engages the brain, it also bypasses it into a deeper level of resonance, in our whole selves.”
Learn more about Diana Newton on her website www.threesistersofroe.com/ and on Instagram at @3sistersofroe. Visit Diana’s studio at the Eno Arts Mill during First Fridays at the Mill.
by Diana Newton
(story and photos via Orange County Arts Commission)
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Can Sculptures Embody Feminist Rage? Artist Diana Newton Says ‘Yes’ Chapelboro.com.
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