Girls Manufactured

Girls Manufactured is a series of five ceramic vases exploring social media–driven feminine archetypes. I used AI datasets for each identity and merged my own face, transferring the images onto clay to link ancient patriarchy with today’s curated ideals.

This project consists of a series of five vases, each featuring images that represent social media-driven identities which often commodify and neatly package femininity.

I found myself endlessly scrolling through social media, like so many of us do, and what caught my attention were the so-called “cores”: aesthetic subcultures that tightly categorise visual styles and, by extension, entire identities. These aesthetic cores often revolve around “Girl” personas, such as the Coconut Girl and other female personas, such as the Tradwife, the Femme Fatale, Y2k Bimbo and the Angel from the Angelcore aesthetic. Each of these comes with a rigid set of visual, ideological, and lifestyle rules.

Each vase in this series represents one identity. The images on the vases are photo-based: Constructed from hundreds of photographs circulating online for each identity, combined with my own photographic self-portraits. For each AI-dataset (one per identity) I collected around 500 pictures circulating on social media. I trained the models to integrate my own face into these representations, underlining the fact that I, too, as a young woman, am constantly scrolling through these worlds and am a direct target of their seductive pull.

Both AI and social media function as systems of repetition, reduction, and reinforcement: they absorb dominant cultural inputs and return them as normalised content. This project stages a dialogue between the photographs that circulate online, the AI systems that reprocess them, and myself as the artist manipulating and recontextualising them.

I chose vases to represent these identities, because vases have long been associated with femininity, not only through their nurturing, container-like quality, but also through their decorative aspects. For this project specifically, the form of the vase was modelled after the Panathenaic Amphora, an object historically awarded to male victors in ancient Greek athletic competitions. By merging these ancient vessel forms, which symbolised male achievement, with the contemporary and highly curated images of femininity designed to please the male gaze, I aim highlighting how today’s representations of women continue to be shaped by patriarchal frameworks.

For this project I collaborated with a skilled ceramic artisan, Emile Mazzone, who created the bisque vase forms on the throwing wheel. Once the shapes were completed, I took over the process with glazing, firing and applying the images.

Ceramics has become an essential part of my exploration. It is a slow, technical, and often unpredictable medium that demands patience, precision, and resources. For me, working with clay is not a departure from photography but an extension of it. By transferring images into ceramic surfaces, I embed them into forms that can last for centuries. Unlike digital images that disappear in an endless scroll, these photographs fuse permanently with the glaze during firing. Each piece becomes a time capsule: contemporary images shaped by online culture, transformed into enduring vessels.