Aingeals, 2021
“Aingeal” - Irish and Scottish Gaelic for ‘angel’.
Aingeals is a body of soft sculptural works made of satin stuffed with polyester wadding, with various adornments such as glass and pearl beads, crystal and acrylic diamontes, lingerie, feather boa, and BDSM equipmenmt. The enquiry of this series explores and examines the idea of the female body though an angelic and absracted point of view.
The Irish and Scottish Gaelic origin comes from MacNeil linking three generations of her family - her grandmother, her mother, and herself - as they share a skill in sewing and working with fabrics.
The values of the anti-aesthetic and the abject is moulded into this point of view, and then motifs of traditional and standard feminine beauty are then combined with those values. The various themes of luxury, high fashion, pornography, and BDSM contribute into this enquiry of female beauty.
Aingeals has been showcased in a group exhibition, Urban Adolescence in August 2021 and Eden Arts Art School Awards 2021 in February 2022.
Images courtesy of Yoon Tae Kim, 2021.