My socially engaged artistic practice encompasses performance, photography, video, and installation. I examine my experiences in contemporary consumer culture through a queer, feminist and anti-capitalist lens, often working with participants in workshops to examine social issues and co-create alternative visual languages. For example, in the Recycled Relics project, participants made sculptures for still-life photographs using waste material to consider the value of objects in times of environmental crisis. In the Bois of Isolation project (in collaboration with AC Davidson), we explored visual approaches to queering the gender binary in selfies during the confines of the pandemic. 

My artwork is a form of activism and a feminist critique of representations of gender in commercial and popular culture. This began with an examination of naturalized gender performance in early works such as The Doll’s house and idealized representations of femininity in The Substitute and Visual Pleasure. In my still-life work, such as Pacifier and Hysterical Selfies, I attempted to describe the idealised, gendered, ageing body through commodities. I also examined self-tracking practices to understand how these forms of measurement and judgement contribute to an ideology of health, and produce particular subjectivities. 

Currently I am developing #Rebel Selves, a project that comprises a series of self-portraits, participatory installations, a smart phone app and artworks produced in collaboration with queer contemporary dancers.  #Rebel Selves critiques idealised heteronormative gender expectations in selfies and portraiture. A series of theatre flats and banners, wearable sculptures and photographic cut-outs create a performative space in which visitors can create queer selfies that rebel against gender and beauty norms. Selfies are an important contemporary mode of self-presentation, however, they are often restrained in relation to binary gender beauty ideals. Research shows that bodies that do not reflect these norms, such as those marginalised in terms of race, gender, sexuality, size and disability, are subject to greater discipline and hostility online. The project aims to develop a visual and gestural language for queer selfies present the individual as a glitchy, composite person formed from blurring fragments of body and installation. They will challenge the human centricity of consumer culture, blending the self with different objects, places, and people, to give a complex impression of a more-than-human multispecies tentacular entanglement, to use Donna Haraway’s term (2016).