fold your hands child

Exploring femininity through a softened lens, where florals and textures blur beauty and unease. Open-ended, it reflects my shifting sense of femininity when filtered through the female gaze.

This ongoing series explores femininity through staged encounters between figures and florals—softness as both aesthetic and question. Working with friends and collaborators, I construct images that use familiar symbols of delicacy (flowers, gestures, pastel palettes) while allowing them to become complicated, caught between beauty and unease, between what's seen and deliberately obscured.

I'm interested in the entanglement of gazes—how women have become so fluent in the language of male desire that it's difficult to locate what might be uniquely ours. Rather than attempting to define a "pure" feminine aesthetic, this work investigates what it means to reach for one anyway, knowing the territory is already coded. There's something about working within inherited symbols while questioning their function—are these flowers attracting or deflecting? Is softness a form of power or performance?

This project, as does any of my work, draws from a lineage of women photographers who have navigated the complex balance of photographing women and existing as a woman. Julia Margaret Cameron's portraits invite her subjects to be both ethereal and psychologically present. Rineke Dijkstra's adolescent portraits, and later her portraits of new mothers, capture an in-between state, her subjects both vulnerable and quietly powerful. Sally Mann's work with her family pulls into focus the line between documentation and construction, raising questions about who has the permission to look, and what staging within relationships of trust can reveal. Like these photographers, I am working with available visual vocabularies, testing their limits, constructing scenarios that feel simultaneously nostalgic and newly examined.

Beyond the portraits (not yet pictured), I'm exploring flowers in isolation and transformation—submerged in water, frozen in ice, perhaps burned. These experiments ask what happens to symbols of femininity when subjected to different conditions, when their decorative function is stripped away or altered. The language of flowers—adds another layer of imposed significance to objects already designed (through evolution) to attract, to be beautiful functionally.

I'm currently enrolled in PhMuseum's Curatorial Masterclass where I plan to develop this work further, pushing both the conceptual framework and the relationship between the portrait work and the floral experiments. The project remains intentionally open-ended—a space to test how inherited aesthetics can be revisited with adult consciousness, how softness and strength might coexist when the gaze constructing them is uncertain of its own motivations.