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My work pulls from discourses centered on the imaged body, consumer culture, body aesthetics, and illness. In my projects, through the production of personal objects, photography, video, and performance, these divergent discourses are visually linked.

The imaged body refers to photographs of the body, in advertising and in medicine, as well as mental conceptualizations of the body. I see the imaged and imagined as conceptually linked. In both cases, as a model for the physical body, the visualization is deceptive. The imaged body is stylized, static, manipulated, and often an amalgam of bodily ideals and contemporary design aesthetics. These are all qualities that the physical form resists. Attempts to emulate images of bodies are often futile especially when that imaged body is a romanticized archetype.

What is surprising about imaged bodies are the similarities between images that intend to project ideals and those that display subversive or even abject bodies. Fore example medical imagery, pornography, and advertising display anatomy, often using similar positions and compositions. Contextual cues are necessary to clarify how the bodies are interpreted. These include the format of an image, such as medium and location, and the placement of objects (or lack of) alongside the body in an image.

Objects and their relationship to the body play an integral role in negotiating the disconnect between idealized images of the body and the physical body. By surrounding our bodies with objects that are seen in images alongside the ideal body we hope to amend the imperfect reality of our own form. Some of the most obvious examples of this are the placement of consumer objects (jewelry, clothing, electronics) next to romanticized bodies in advertising, which are then purchased and placed in relation to our own bodies.

The attributes of those objects, fashionable, beautiful, and timeless, are projected onto the body. The objects take on talismanic characteristics. Owning and specifically wearing these objects is a way to appropriate from them the qualities we covet. For example, in the case of jewelry, gold’s brilliance, indelibility, and its unoxodising surface signify beauty, purity, and immortality, qualities that are also desirable in the body. The objects, alongside photographed bodies, become inextricably connected to our conceptualization of the body in general.

In my current work I am replicating and transforming disease through illustration, jewelry objects and photography. These diseases including acne, cancer, herpes, and syphilis, are presented in my work as jeweled infections, lesions, and soars. They are hybridizations of objects we associate with beauty, status, or wealth, and the grotesque or undesirable aspects of the skin.

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