Writing
2023
My practice explores the performance of femininity in the context of private spaces, particularly as it relates to my experiences of intrusive thoughts, anxiety, and my relationship to gender. Through self -portraiture and still life, I recreate periods of mental turmoil within the intimate environment. The safety of the home’s interior takes on a sinister role, filled with mess, discarded refuse, or rotting food. The abject plays a central role in these tableaux, and I’m interested in the bodily sensations such moments provoke for my audience: the tightening of the gorge, a sudden jarring in the gut. These bodily feelings I relate to my own corporeal experience of anxiety attacks, drawing viewers deeper into my personal narrative. In this way, when viewers look at my body, the nude, they are made to feel their own bodies.
My current project recreates elements of my apartment bathroom through cutout paintings, which drape 3-dimensionally over walls and floors. Commercial products marketed as panaceas for so-called wellness are employed as props or ambiguous relics of the feminine toilette. The bathroom rituals depicted are more imagined than documented - a fantasy of how the items might be used. Through these objects and costumes, I communicate my sometimes conflicting memories of emotion and sensation relating to the space. The playful pleasure of the ‘toilette’, the childhood sense of mystery around my mother’s bathroom products, obsessive skin picking and anxiety attacks in the isolation of the shower: these experiences are alluded to in the confrontation between the attractive product and the overworked, waxy masses in the figure. The consumer pleasure of the colourful items is mirrored in the material pleasure of the figurative painting, only for both to be undermined by the abject, the bodily concerns that are tied to the intimacy of the private bathroom space. Menstrual blood swirls in the toilet while personal products clutter every surface. Disembodied masks and beauty products uncannily mirror the absent body, suggesting a shed skin, the empty eyes of a skull. I’m interested in the object's role as costumes in the arcane rituals of femininity, and as symbols of collective anxieties around desirability, aging and death.