fold your hands child

Performed femininity dissected—the gap between what we're told to want and what we desire. Self-portraits from bureaucratic necessities (visa and passport images) alongside portraits of friends, held between legibility and control.

I've always been concerned with perception—what we see and what we know, what we say and what we understand. There's always a gap, always a space where we don't know what we don't know. I don't know if that gap will ever be knowable, and so I try to explore it, to find the edges.

These are portraits of friends and myself (the images of myself are drawn from bureaucratic sources—visa applications, passport photos)—women who have become fluent in the language of performed femininity. What we've all been prescribed to do to get what we want later in life, or what we're told we want: the house, the kids, the husband, the community, the lover. Why do we want these things? Why do we want the new car, the big diamonds, the pretty bag? Does it just boil down to a sense of belonging, or is there something more? Yes, we are influenced by media. Yes, we are shaped by society, but why?

I wanted to dissect performed femininity, to highlight it—but also to interact with the hypocrisy. We know the performance is a performance. We do it anyway. We want the things we know are constructed wants. The work sits in that uncomfortable knowing.

The images become sites of friction between performed femininity and authentic self-knowledge—between what we're told to want and what we actually desire. My mind flows back and forth between these thoughts, scaling up and down between desire and need. And it always comes back to the gap—the space between what's known and what's knowable. A desire for legibility and the refuge of opacity.

This work has been developing through PhMuseum's Curae Masterclass. It remains open—and is still very much in the process of building.