Liquid Specimen

With this series I am confronting the viewer with an image of a woman in a glass box (aquarium). Her femaleness or femininity on display.

The struggle, awkwardness and sometimes discomfort of the women in this confined space, surrounded by water, represents the discomfort and restrictiveness of being ‘trapped’ in a body: the ideas of what the (female) body should be, look like and represented as.

The water symbolises many things, amongst them the unconscious, emotion and feeling. The water also changes colour in some of the images and can allude to body fluids i.e menstruation, breast milk etc. There is a lot of discomfort surrounding breastfeeding in public and menstruating women are being seen as “dirty” and hormonal.

Instead of focussing on the female form in and of itself my aim with Liquid Specimen is to bring the attention to the expression of being a woman and celebrate the beauty within that expression.

By isolating these experiences and playing with the idea of specimens of femininity it further emphasises a contradiction of fluidity in confinement. My hope is that these images provoke a feeling of empathy within the viewer and a connection with their own inner feminine.