A body of work in search of new meanings when looking at female mythology, masquerade and iconography.
Often following the archetype; the maiden & madonna or the whore - and in-between lies the over-sexualized woman hardly in charge of her own pleasure. Repressed fears and desires are projected onto the female body and thus portrayed with a message that there is only one (or the other) way to be a woman, and one way to fit into archetypes created for us; the paradox of being seen (as a body) and unseen (as a subject). Joan Riviere’s seminal work “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (1929) argues that the masquerade is the symptom and the cure of women’s anxiety of trespassing the borders between domestic and public spheres, putting emphasis on her social and political experience. This is a balance between disguise and display, where she can reclaim and liberate her body and the privacy that exists in her own reflection. Additionally, the mask, or the persona, for Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, is the face the individual presents to the world—"a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual."
Mainly inspired by surrealists and painters, this body of work consists of self portraiture in disguise, blended with images of women exploring certain personas and archetypes and their opposites - the mask of (presumed) female perfection; the bride, the mother, the lover, the saint, the maiden, the damsel in distress, the southern belle - a woman depicted in the navigation through the projected images on her.