Creaming Strawberries
An artistic collaboration by
Coco Warner-Allen & Naïstini Valaydon
Creaming Strawberries is an artistic duo that works on the exposure of trauma that comes from growing up in an oppressive white supremacist capitalist patriarchal society, a term coined by the trailblazing author and activist bell hooks. Besides reporting and exposing facts in a very direct manner, our aim is mostly to raise awareness about issues that affect an overwhelming majority of the female identifying population in the UK.
Along as raising awareness, our goal is to empower women by making them feel that they don’t stand alone and have a right to raise their voices. We also make sure to provide opportunities to share and learn, how to deal with trauma, how to heal, what healing is, learn about their body and sexuality in a healthy sex positive way.
We want to make sure that our work remains inclusive of all kind of representation. We aim to prioritise visibility for women, minority groups, BIPOC and people belonging to marginalised genders.
​
Our main focus is to depict the reality of how we co-exist as human beings in this modern society. A society where the objectification of our bodies, mental and physical assault, toxic masculinity and violence are omnipresent in our lives.
​
Talking about these issues is a definite start, but we hope to achieve more by deconstructing these socially made up ideas and offer a safe space for healing and empowerment.
We start our process by raising awareness through art. We also offer artist led workshops and also act as a bridge towards professional mental health care for those who need it.
Meet the team
Coco Warner-Allen is a London based artist who uses her multi-media practise to explore ideas such as the performativity of the self through a gendered lens and how damaging the current media environment is to girls and women.
Coco works to give a voice for women and draw attention to their viewpoint, one so often ignored and dismissed. She explores and overtly denies the ideals of what a woman should be and brings women’s voices into the public realm.
Her practise is feminine, humorous, and excessive. The works take on a diarist format as she explores identity and traditional concepts of femininity in the modern age. She draws on her own lived experience of being in a woman’s body in an image obsessed culture as well as addressing the pain that living in a patriarchal society can cause. Her work as a textile artist subverts the traditional use of embroidery as a mode to keep women with their hands busy and minds idle. Her work exploits the delicacy and domesticity of embroidery, beading and knitting yet she produces pieces that watch the spectator back, denying voyeurism and passivity.
Naïstini Valaydon is a multimedia artist working primarily with photography, film and installation. Her work explores the human condition and psychology through a complex study of the human
body and mind.
Naïstini’s work explores interpersonal relationships, love, sex, romance and femininity. Accordingly, all these themes have one point of convergence which is, human violence and trauma. Therefore a recurring examination in her works is, how to exist and to co-exist in this current society.
Her artworks are known to be very visceral as she makes use of her personal life as a field of research, which provides her work with authenticity and relatability.
The aim of her work is to create a cathartic moment to the audience allowing space and time for education and understanding of the self. Naïstini uses the contemporary art scene as a terrain for activism as it is the only place where a philosophical and political idea can meet and be discussed visually.