Send Nudes

Send Nudes became my tool of authorship. Through self portraiture & performance, my work constructs exaggerated characters via costume, props, & visible artifice. Influenced by my love of b-horror, Cindy Sherman, Nadia Lee-Cohen & Haley Morris-Cafiero, I reject seamless realism. Frayed seams, SFX blood, crushed Feminax, felted body hair & deliberately ill fitting costume insist identity is constructed rather than innate. John Berger theorises women as simultaneously surveyed & self surveying, internalising the male gaze through body discipline. Laura Mulvey conceptualises this internalisation as a subconscious condition of "to-be-looked-at-ness". Send Nudes distorts this spectacle of femininity. By challenging its visual economy, refusing passivity, injecting humour, excess & the grotesque, my work lays bare its cogs. The body becomes a political surface, stitched together by media, trauma, capitalism & expectation. Bodies bleed, bulge, sag, scar & persist.

My involvement with body politics is lived, embodied & ongoing, emerging from a lifetime of being told how each limb should look, behave, perform, endure. Growing up millennial, I was shaped by a visual culture saturated with paparazzi, lad culture, heroin chic, ProAna, reality TV & ads that framed bodily scrutiny & surveillance as aspiration/choice. At home I saw daily the control over the female body. My dad embodied a violent entitled masculinity amplified by alcohol, societal brotherhood & patriarchal authority. His invasive presence would pop up as limewire downloaded porn when on MSN, or as a Microsoft paperclip apology after another violent weekend, a surreal gesture of digital absorption mirroring his inconsistent care. It taught me at 7 how bodies are policed & silenced in private & public eye. These experiences did more than shape me, they trained my eye.

We're living in a particularly intensified movement of body politics. Algorithmic beauty standards, AI generated bodies, non-consensual undressing, restrictive reproductive rights, & commodified insecurity converge on the body as a site of profit & control. Wellness trends and how they collapse into surveillance while reproductive healthcare remains fragile & dismissive of women's pain. My work insists on visibility & coexistence of humour, horror & rage.

In my work, the body as ideal is not the symbol. It's lived, politicised & resistant.

Now is the moment to insist on visibility not as perfection but as truth.