Virtuous Girl

In Dirty Flowers, Chanee Vijay presents a suite of hemp textile collages that investigate the emotional architecture of shame as it is experienced by women. Through layered compositions and fleshy, tinged tones, the works evoke how shame is carried in silence — shaped by cultural conditioning, family systems, and lived experience. Vijay reflects on its many forms: the pressures of beauty, the double binds of sexuality, the weight of caregiving, and the guilt embedded in ambition and self-assertion. Here, shame is not only psychological but somatic, lodged in the body as tightness, heaviness, and disconnection.

Yet Dirty Flowers is not a lament but a gesture of release. The series invites viewers to confront the roots of shame and imagine what might be shed. Vijay proposes that healing begins with visibility and kindness, with the courage to reshape inherited narratives.