Cry to the Angels

This body of work explores the aesthetics and emotional architecture of an imagined girlhood– one shaped as much by cultural iconography and internet nostalgia as by personal memory.

I spent a lot of my teenage years on internet blogs looking at images that would likely be categorized under terms like “girlhood” or “coming of age”. They featured young people either alone or spending time with their friends, often in mundane settings, but they had a sense of freedom and adventure. They were beautiful. 

I was jealous of these strangers on the internet. I wanted to be one of these girls, who, from my perspective at the time, were like movie characters. My time spent consuming other peoples snapshots made me unsatisfied with my own life. I wanted to feel in my own life what looking at those pictures made me feel. I thought maybe if I started taking my own pictures, that I could cement myself as one of them. 

This body of work explores the aesthetics and emotional architecture of an imagined girlhood– one shaped as much by cultural iconography and internet nostalgia as by personal memory. These images function as self-mythologizing tools: visual constructions of the girl I longed to be, rather than portraits of who I was.

The characters depicted within these scenes are not documentary subjects but archetypes; highly stylised, emotionally isolated, and suspended in an unattainable moment of beauty and freedom. The series resists narrative closure and instead embraces longing as its central theme. At its core, this project is less about representing girlhood as it was, and more about creating space for the version that never materialized.