Exhibitions 2024

Loretto Spring Art

Featured emerging artist of the year

My practice explores experiences of body and femininity through depictions of personal narratives. My experience within the male gaze has enforced the mentality that my value as a woman is driven by my bodily usefulness. I paint chairs, valued only on their aesthetic quality, to personally symbolise this objectification. The sole intended use of the chair is to support our bodies. Thus I suspend its usefulness by withholding human interaction, to represent the way the male gaze determines feminine utility through bodily use. I paint myself, exposed, to portray my forced vulnerability to the male gaze in accordance with this objectification, and subtly protest it by denying a seductive view. By refusing view of vulnerable bodily places and enhancing socially unacceptable female beauty traits, such as broad shoulders, blemishes, strength, and self confidence, I interrupt societies habitual feminine eroticism and refuse the expectation to submit to it.

Through this series, I explore my experience of objectification and feeling used through a lens of healing, and expand on simply commenting on the male gaze. Methods of collection, self protection and eraser are steps toward distorting this ingrained mentally. I refuse to be the object the male gaze wants me to be.