Gender in T&T

ENG6814 – Gender in T&T

Gendered Technology Artifact

My paper was about gender in the cycling industry, but it started with a lot of reading about gendered toys and childhood play. I read various psychology and advertising papers about why children play with specific toys and why we encourage different sorts of play. Very little of this made it into the paper.

This shopping center has a series of sculptures of children at play. Some of them are exceedingly gendered in most of their depictions – the boys are playing with toy boats and planes, while the girls have paper dolls, a seashell, or flowers.

Process:

These models were created via photogrammetry, a 3D modelling process in which a series of still, 2D photographs are stitched together to produce a 3D model.

For each sculpture, I took about 130 photographs, and then used Agisoft Metashape to produce the model.

The Artist?

I believe some of these sculptures are by Gary Price, as one of them is signed. I spent some time researching sculptors who do commercial work in bronze of scenes of children at play and his work matches in style and subject.

However, others appear to have another signature on them, though I was unable to locate a specific artist.

Others match a third artist, Jane DeDeckler.

Limitations:

I definitely did not have permission to take these photographs. I only took photographs of sculptures where I thought I could get the photos done before drawing too much attention. There are many more sculptures around the facility, many of which are in the middle of hedges or other places that would be even more conspicuous.

Two statues of girls playing. One with paper dolls, the other with a seashell.

A statue of a boy playing with a toy boat.

A statue of a boy playing with a toy airplane.

More on the Artist(s?):

I found these sculptures to be strikingly gendered in that the toys the children are playing with fit neatly into gender norms. One of the sculptures I did not model is of a boy riding a giant snail – I found a match for this on Price’s website. I do find these choices particularly amusing when juxtaposed by this quote that appears throughout the artist’s website:

“I hope I can assist the world in visualizing a place where fences and boundaries, both real and imagined are non-existent; a place where bias and prejudice are long forgotten; and finally, a place where acts of kindness, mutual respect, and love are everyday happenings.”

Jane DeDeckler is an artist who specializes in bronze statues, and is particularly focused on sculptures depicting families and children. I found a match for the statue of the girl with paper dolls on her website. She has statues dedicated to honoring several prominent women including Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickenson, Ida B. Wells, and many more. She has been named as one of the artists who is going to work on an upcoming Women’s Suffrage National Monument in D.C., so she is very clearly interested in depicting women and girls, which makes the juxtaposition in this curated set of statues very curious.

Additional limitations/areas for improvement:

Most of the ways forward for improvement on this project/type of activity involve having advance permission to be there and take photographs. Broadly speaking, it isn’t necessary – they are out in the open in a sort of public place, but you probably do not have a right to traipse through the bushes without advance permission. Other improvements would come from better lighting. Counterintuitively, photogrammetry works best with diffuse lighting, so an overcast day would actually be best. Most of these are not smooth pieces and have a lot of texture, which worked in my favor, but in some instances I struggled with issues from excessive shine on the bronze in some areas, while deep shadows caused some issues in others. Areas that are particularly rough or have holes are caused by a combination of not enough photographs or challenges with lighting. The issue with holes is most notable when looking at the ground or pieces of background that are incidentally included, rather than the sculpture itself.