Untitled

This body of work at its core is about looking, being looked at, and the discomfort that exists within the two. As this series first began, I thought it was going to be about these two women, my mother and grandmother, and understanding who they are through their unique experiences of womanhood. While trying to dissect who they were, I realized that I couldn’t do this without including myself, and that’s when I decided to become physically present within the work. In order for me to truly understand who I was as a woman, I had to understand the women who have preceded me. Through forcing my body into my grandmother’s clothes and performing as another version of myself, I was able to explore and confront the profound representations of gender and objectification.

Through an obsessive analyzation of my mother and grandmother over the past years, I’ve uncovered just as many vulnerabilities in them as I have within myself. Watching how the two of them represent different parts of themselves to the camera and collaborating with them through the act of image making has been an extremely intimate process. The mirrors, for example, provide you with a secret window into a part of someone that would otherwise be opaque. In working with themes of domesticated spaces and childhood motifs such as playing dress up, I’ve been able to create this reality within my own that has given me the ability to see the three of us in a way I had never been able to before. I feel that John Berger describes this experience I’m constantly trying to understand in Ways of Seeing, where he states “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.”

This series has drastically widened my need to understand representations of women and sexuality in a way that didn’t exist before. How we as women feel we need to perform varies constantly and culturally and this the direction I feel this work has been pulling me towards. I want and need to explore more outside of my own experience. I want to connect with a different landscape physically and intimately and I feel that if chosen for the Residency Bursary at Landskrona Foto, this would give me the opportunity to do just that. Having never done a residency program before, the possibilities for growth within myself and my work is incredibly exciting and necessary to not just becoming a better artist, but furthering my navigation of understanding human connection and the connection we have with ourselves.