Icyyy Grip expansively and auto-ethnographically examines breast ironing alongside my own breastreduction. Breast ironing is a very niche cultural practice in rural parts of my familial country, Cameroon, where young girl's chests are pounded with heated objects to stop breast development, theoretically preventing unwanted attention, early pregnancy, and sexual assault. This protective mutilation is typically carried out by an older female relative - a mother, a grandmother, an auntie - intergenerationally passing down physical and psychological scars.

Whilst posing for the pre-procedure pictures for my breast reduction surgery in 2021, I thought about the privilege of being UK-born and able to afford elective surgery. I thought about whether breast ironing might have been inflicted upon me in another geographical context, and whether it could have successfully paused my growth and prevented sexual assault.

I thought about the societal and structural adultification of young Black girls, and the state of constant discomfort that arose from constantly being sexualised for my large breasts as a child, a teenager, and an adult. Post-surgery, this discomfort still persists, and I often find it very difficult to be photographed or even simply observed. Later, I thought of colonial photography of bare-breasted African women and girls. The subjects of these purportedly ethnographic, subtextually titillating images were observed, posed, and dissected in uncomfortably familiar ways. The camera was an object of violence, shooting with impunity.

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 time 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.

- Kialy Tihngang