Following a trip to Tanzania, I had the opportunity to meet a Maasai woman. She explained to me how social roles between men and women are established within a patriarchal society with a social heritage spanning thousands of years. This encounter marked a turning point in my artistic practice.

The role of women is, evidently, one of utility to their husbands. They provide sex, motherhood and labour in exchange for a dignified place within the community, but without the right to private property. It is a polytheistic and polygamous society, although polygamy applies exclusively to men. Women manage and care for their husbands’ property, but only so that it can eventually be passed on to their male children.

They practise rites of passage, such as female genital mutilation and circumcision. Marriage is only accessible to those who can afford a bride price. The remaining unmarried men become part of the warrior class.

Through research in anthropology, I came to understand that 99% of human societies across the world are patriarchal in their predominant social structure. This appears to be closely linked to the transmission of wealth and property acquired by male ancestors to their sons. Women receive protection and material support throughout the extended process of raising children. The greatest form of poverty falls upon infertile women.

In this sense, woman has no independent identity, but depends entirely on man, like a small button sewn somewhere within an endogamous social structure. This parallel between a button, a humble element whose character is strictly functional, and woman becomes a powerful analogy through which to develop organic, rounded forms. Each element evokes a oneiric reality in which the ‘Lortian Buttons’ acquire significance in their own right, breaking free from their functional and social role and offering a new form of visual and conceptual beauty.