Andrea Bowers’ (b. 1965, Wilmington, USA) Radical Feminist Pirate Ship Tree Sitting Platform (2013) is animated by a call for resistance and activism. In 2011, Bowers was arrested in California for tree sitting, an act of environmentalist civil disobedience in which protesters sit in a tree, usually on a small platform built for that purpose. During this act, which aimed at preventing native oak woodland habitat from being clearcut, the artist met a veteran tree sitter who had spent the last six years living in old growth redwoods in California. As Bowers notes, upon asking the activist for his fantasy tree sitting platform: ‘All of my frustration, insecurities, and inequalities of living in a patriarchal culture flooded over me with his two words: Pirate Ship. I was immediately annoyed and unamused, of course. A typical man, I thought. Somehow it was so obvious yet, I would have never thought of that.’ Built with the veteran tree sitting activist, the work stands as a symbol of solidarity. An extract from the 1996 essay ‘Sin Big’, by controversial pioneering feminist Mary Daly (b. 1928, Schenectady – d. 2010, Massachusetts), fills the ship’s sail: ‘Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin.’ This essay is a battle cry for Bowers, who was struck by Daly’s explanation of the origins of the word ‘sin’ deriving from the Indo-European root ‘es’, meaning ‘to be’: ‘When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, “to be” in the fullest sense is “to sin”.’