Set within swathes of ice pink silk fabric - simultaneously suggestive of a beauty salon, showroom and girl’s bedroom, Icyyy Grip is comprised of three parts. ‘Flattening Suit’ is a wearable tool designed to compress the breasts through speculative technological or magical activation. Made of various fabrics from charity shops including a girl’s ballet bag, and stitched with the sewing machine my mother bought me as a child, it seeks to preserve the child’s body using the binarised aesthetics of girlhood. It is displayed as a deflated, sagging husk.

In ‘Visualisation’, ‘Flattening Suit’ can be seen in its full turgidity, modelled by a 3D scan of myself. Using photogrammetry to capture my own body in painful detail, I confront ongoing feelings of bodily shame with a pixellated smile. The video interpolates images of Black women splashing water on their faces, mined from beauty and skincare advertisements. This repeated, exaggerated motif feels evocative of a protective ritual, more magical than breast ironing and more beautiful than surgery. By temporarily freezing the avatar in an amorphously watery digital environment, I can ensure her safety.

‘Box’ expands this sexless, sanitised version of adulthood off-screen. It uses the same pink and sparkly aesthetics of feminine care product adverts that dance prudishly around the viscera of womanhood. The work also draws aesthetically upon hair relaxer packaging. Relaxers, often applied to little Black girls by older female relatives, are often the first outward times our bodies are modified for public consumption. Printed digitally, soaked in water, and dried, ‘Box’ is a relic of multiple physical modifications.

Icyyy Grip thinks through the literal, photographic, and digital capture of Black women’s breasts across cultures, geographies and histories, framed by the changing boundaries of my own body.