You may associate knitting with grandmas and the Woman's Institute, but it appears wool and two knitting needles can also be transformed into tools for gender protest.



Casey Jenkins, 34, is at the centre of an unusual piece of performance art, called Casting Off My Womb, in which she is spending 28 days knitting from a ball of wool which she inserted inside her vagina. She is currently halfway through the project.



In a video about the enterprise Casey says: ‘If you take a good, hard look at a vulva, you realize it's just a bit of a body. There's nothing that is shocking or scary, you know, nothing that is going to run out and eat you up.



‘The piece for me is about assessing and being intimate with my own body.’

Casey is performing her piece in a gallery in Australia where she sits daily wearing only a woollen jumper as she knits, with her increasingly long masterpiece hung across coat hangers in front of her.



Despite inserting a new spiel of wool - arranged so it unwinds from the centre - inside herself everyday, Casey insists the experience has not been painful.



‘It’s unusual and it’s confining because I am attached to this knitting so I can't get up and wander around.



‘So it is restrictive, but it’s not painful. I mean people push babies out of there so it is a pretty robust area.’



Unbelievably Casey also valiantly continues with the piece even when she is menstruating.



‘The performance wouldn't be a performance if I were going to cut out my menstrual cycle from it.



‘When I’m menstruating it makes knitting a hell of a lot harder because the wool is heavy and you have to yank at it.'



Casey, who calls herself a ‘performer craftavist’ is a member of the ‘Craft Cartel’ group who describe themselves on their website as ‘for crafty types who don't dig rose-scented doilies.’



They use art and performance to protest about feminist and social issues.

The aim of Casting Off my Womb is to challenge the negative and fearful view of the femail genitalia.



‘I think the expectation when you’re showing the vulva is that people are going to feel fear and revulsion.



‘So by linking the vulva to something that people find warm and fuzzy and benign and even boring, such as knitting for a long period of time, I hope that people question their fears and the negative association with it.’



Though this might seem an odd concept, Casey is my no means the first artist to ultilise their genetalia and menstruasion in their work.



Earlier this year a woman who spent five years collecting her menstrual blood on scraps of cloth turned the red-stained fabric into an art exhibition.

Placed in embroidery hoops, 90 pieces of the soiled cloths hang next to dangling apples, which are meant to represent ovulation.



Carina Ubeda, from Chile, then stitched the words 'Production', 'Discard', and 'Destroyed' below each of the stains.



Exhibited at the Center of Culture and Health in Quillota, the cloths, which Ms Ubeda used instead of tampons or pads, are presented as 'an abstract image'.