Janet Biggs

I was a "horsey girl."  It started with my first pony ride, grew to drawings coving all my notebooks, and settled into riding every afternoon and weekend.  I was hooked from the fist nicker, the first flowing mane and soft muzzle.  The realization that at an age when decisions were usually made by others, I could experience freedom and control from the back of a twelve hundred-pund animal confirmed my "horsey girl" status.  Even when classmates moved their seats away from me in response to the manure clinging to my shoes, I thought it would last forever.

Somewhere after Lytle Nell and Canadian Blue, after Pony Club and high school, I stopped riding.  My time was spent with art school, then career goals.  Eighteen years later I found myself at a riding academy, scouting a site to shoot my next video.  Within half an hour I was astride a chestnut gelding, taking a lesson.  I now spend most mornings at the barn and consider it an extension of my studio.  I still don't know if that first video piece was a natural progression in my artistic exploration of female identity, or just a need to get back in the saddle.  Whichever, the following images are of video installations by a "horsey girl." (Janet Biggs, Girls and Horses, nine-channel video installation, 1996)

*Janet Biggs, Horsey Girl, Horse People: Writers and Artists on the Horses They Love, Artisan, 1998

This exhibition examines girls' relationships with horses, exploring issues of power, sexuality and autonomy.

Many girls have experienced an infatuation with the horse. This romance takes many forms, from early play, through fantasy and desire, and perhaps to the act of riding.

The horse, a symbol of beauty, power, freedom and magic, can be an object of identification or serve as a protector.

"The ability to control an animal so much bigger than herself gave her a sense of awe and wonderful power. It was, however, not only gratifying in a physical sense; the caring for, riding, and showing of the horse also represented the mastery of a world that was completely mysterious to the uninitiated."

John E. Schowalter from the essay "Some Meanings of Being a Horsewoman," Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1983, Vol. 38.