Womanhood in Process. Cracked. Whole. Real.

Artist: Shweta Iyer
Theme: Empowerment

We still expect women to arrive fully formed. Graceful, capable, unbroken. But the truth is, most of womanhood happens in process — in what doesn’t get posted, published, or praised. Shweta Iyer’s work sits right in that space. The unfinished. The fractured. The parts still being reclaimed.

“I create to celebrate womanhood. Not the ideal. The real,” she says. “We adapt, we multitask, we break and rebuild.”

In Imperfectly Perfect, a fragmented figure is stitched back together with gold. Not hidden. Not restored. Made whole through visibility. Shweta pulls from Kintsugi, but the metaphor lands differently here. This isn’t repair as redemption. It’s survival as identity. She isn’t healed. She’s evolving in plain sight.

The External Gaze moves from self to scrutiny. A woman surrounded by eyes. Watching. Measuring. Interpreting. It’s familiar. Every woman knows what it means to be seen through other people’s lenses. But in Shweta’s framing, something shifts. “When she stops looking through their eyes, she finds herself,” she writes. That moment is the real subject of the work. Not the gaze, but the exit from it.

This isn’t empowerment as confidence or performance. It’s empowerment as clarity. Quiet. Internal. Sometimes invisible. The kind that doesn’t announce itself but changes everything.

Shweta’s work doesn’t perform identity. It processes it. It stays close to the parts that usually get brushed over — the cracks, the pauses, the long moments before clarity sets in.

It doesn’t speak to visibility as validation. It speaks to what happens when the gaze shifts inward.

And that’s the truth she leaves us with. Not a call to be seen, but an invitation to keep looking until something real shows up.